Biomimetic tactile sensors and signal processing with spike trains: A review

The sense of touch plays a critical role in enabling human beings to interact with the surrounding environments. As robots move from laboratories to domestic environments, they are expected to be endowed with a similar tactile ability to perform complicated tasks such as manipulating objects with arbitrary unknown shapes. In the past decade, tremendous effort and progress have been made to mimic the sense of touch in human beings on robotic systems. Particularly, biomimetic tactile sensors and signal processing with spike trains have gained a growing interest. In this paper, we firstly review human sense of touch as it serves as a reference point in the case of biomimetic tactile sensing. Then, we focus on biomimetic tactile sensing technologies, which are primarily presented in two aspects: emulating the properties of mechanoreceptors using artificial tactile sensors, and biomimetic tactile signal processing with spike trains. Finally, we discuss the problems in current biomimetic tactile sensing techniques and deduce the future directions. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.