MagTac: Magnetic Six-Axis Force/Torque Fingertip Tactile Sensor for Robotic Hand Applications

Abstract

We develop a novel hall-effect-based six-axis force/torque (F/T) tactile sensor integrated into the fingertip of robotic hands. When the robotic hands performs the grasping tasks in an unstructured environment, the visual information plays a main role in sensing the external properties of the objects. However, the various intrinsic properties of the objects such as softness, roughness, mass distribution, and weight cannot be measured properly only with the visual information. To detect the various force information in performing diverse tasks, we aim to implement the six-axis F/T fingertip tactile sensor with hall-effect-based principle. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sensor can measure the six-axis F/T with average errors of about 3.3 %. In addition, it is observed that the effect of stray field can be shielded by applying a soft magnetic shielding film to the sensor.