This chapter provides an overview of tactile sensing in robotics. This chapter is an attemptto answer three basic questions:• What is meant by Tactile Sensing?• Why Tactile Sensing is important?• How Tactile Sensing is achieved?The chapter is organized to sequentially provide the answers to above basic questions.Tactile sensing has often been considered as force sensing, which is not wholly true. In orderto clarify such misconceptions about tactile sensing, it is defined in section 2. Why tactilesection is important for robotics and what parameters are needed to be measured by tactilesensors to successfully perform various tasks, are discussed in section 3. An overview of`How tactile sensing has been achieved’ is given in section 4, where a number oftechnologies and transduction methods, that have been used to improve the tactile sensingcapability of robotic devices, are discussed. Lack of any tactile analog to ComplementaryMetal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) or Charge Coupled Devices (CCD) optical arrays hasoften been cited as one of the reasons for the slow development of tactile sensing vis-à-visother sense modalities like vision sensing. Our own contribution – development of tactilesensing arrays using piezoelectric polymers and involving silicon micromachining - is anattempt in the direction of achieving tactile analog of CMOS optical arrays. The first phaseimplementation of these tactile sensing arrays is discussed in section 5. Section 6 concludesthe chapter with a brief discussion on the present status of tactile sensing and the challengesthat remain to be solved.
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