Design and Evaluation of Tactile Sensors for the Estimation of Grasped Wire Shape

This work presents the design of the tactile sensor within the WIRES project, aimed at automating the cabling process of switchgears. The design objective is the development of a sensor able to estimate both position and orientation of the grasped wire, with respect to a known reference frame. To this aim, an extensive Finite Element analysis has been performed to optimize the number of taxels, by simulating the contact between the sensor and wires with various diameters and grasping conditions. A specific algorithm for the reconstruction of the grasped wire shape has been developed and used for defining suitable metrics adopted in the design phase. Based on simulation results, a first prototype of the sensor has been realized and the proposed reconstruction algorithm has been experimentally tested.