Towards Humanlike Social Touch for Sociable Robotics and Prosthetics: Comparisons on the Compliance, Conformance and Hysteresis of Synthetic and Human Fingertip Skins

摘要

The artificial hands for sociable robotics and prosthetics are expected to betouched by other people. Because the skin is the main interface during thecontact, a need arises to duplicate humanlike characteristics for artificialskins for safety and social acceptance. Towards the goal of replicatinghumanlike social touch, this paper compares the skin compliance, conformanceand hysteresis of typical robotic and prosthetic skin materials, such assilicone and polyurethane, with the published biomechanical behaviour of thehuman fingertip. The objective was achieved through materials characterization,finite element (FE) modeling and validation experiments. Our initial attemptshowed that the selected types of silicone and polyurethane materials did notexhibit the same qualities as the human fingertip skin. However, themethodologies described herein can be used to evaluate other materials, theirpossible combinations or other fingertip design configurations