Integrated circuit interface for artificial skins

R. Maldonado-López; F. Vidal-Verdú; G. Liñán

doi:10.1117/12.724183

Translator Disclaimer

29 May 2007 Integrated circuit interface for artificial skins

R. Maldonado-López, F. Vidal-Verdú, G. Liñán

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6592, Bioengineered and Bioinspired Systems III; 65920D (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.724183
Event: Microtechnologies for the New Millennium, 2007, Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, Spain

Abstract

Artificial sensitive skins are intended to emulate the human skin to improve the skills of robots and machinery in complex unstructured environments. They are basically smart arrays of pressure sensors. As in the case of artificial retinas, one problem to solve is the management of the huge amount of information that such arrays provide, especially if this information should be used by a central processing unit to implement some control algorithms. An approach to manage such information is to increment the signal processing performed close to the sensor in order to extract the useful information and reduce the errors caused by long wires. This paper proposes the use of voltage to frequency converters to implement a quite straightforward analog to digital conversion as front end interface to digital circuitry in a smart tactile sensor. The circuitry commonly implemented to read out the information from a piezoresistive tactile sensor can be modified to turn it into an array of voltage to frequency converters. This is carried out in this paper, where the feasibility of the idea is shown through simulations and its performance is discussed.

Citation Download Citation

R. Maldonado-López, F. Vidal-Verdú, and G. Liñán "Integrated circuit interface for artificial skins", Proc. SPIE 6592, Bioengineered and Bioinspired Systems III, 65920D (29 May 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.724183

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE