Full-hand electrotactile feedback using electronic skin and matrix electrodes for high-bandwidth human-machine interfacing

Tactile feedback is relevant in a broad range of human-machine interaction systems (e.g., teleoperation, virtual reality and prosthetics). The available tactile feedback interfaces comprise few sensing and stimulation units, which limits the amount of information conveyed to the user. The present study describes a novel technology that relies on distributed sensing and stimulation to convey comprehensive tactile feedback to the user of a robotic end-effector. The system comprises six flexible sensing arrays (57 sensors) integrated on the fingers and palm of a robotic hand, embedded electronics (64 channels), a multichannel stimulator (32 channels), and seven flexible electrodes (64 pads) placed on the volar side of the subject’s hand. The system was tested in seven able-bodied subjects asked to recognize contact positions and identify contact sliding on the electronic skin, using distributed (DAC) and single dedicated (SAC) anode configurations. This dataset contains the raw data presented in figure 6 i.e output of 5 sensors when applying sliding and press patterns. It also includes the results presented in Figures 9, 10, and 11.