Pressure-Driven Body Compliance Using Robot Skin

Skin can provide rich multi-modal contact information about the interaction forces of a robot with its environment. With this new way of sensing, a new generation of compliant controllers can be developed to enable different kinds of interactions. In this letter, a pressure-driven compliance controller is presented to generate virtual compliant forces depending on both external contact forces and their area of contact. The proposed controller can be adapted for any skin technology that provides a spatial distribution of force sensors over the surface of a robot and the geometry of the contact areas. This modality of body compliance is formulated as a task function, which can be inserted in strict or non-strict hierarchical task execution policies. The controller was tested on the upper body of a humanoid robot (16 DoF) covered with robot skin.