Slow pain generation model caused by mechanical stimulus based on the laminated structure of skin

The ability of autonomous robots to learn from the experience of the subjective feeling of pain can be an important advance of robot development. In our previous studies we examined a model of artificial superficial pain caused by impact and proposed a mechanism of pain transmission focused on the input–output relationships. However, the mechanism of the pain generation has not been studied yet. In this paper, the model of slow pain taking into account the skin dynamics is proposed. Using FEM simulations we demonstrated that the strain energy density (SED) arising at inter‐layer borders is related to the subjective pain level. The proposed pain model was evaluated using the experimental pain caused by quasi‐static motion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 178(3): 31–41, 2012; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.21161