Safety of human-robot physical interaction is enabled not only by suitable robot control strategies but also by suitable sensing\ntechnologies. For example, if distributed tactile sensors were available on the robot, they could be used not only to detect\nunintentional collisions, but also as human-machine interface by enabling a new mode of social interaction with the machine.\nStarting from their previous works, the authors developed a conformable distributed tactile sensor that can be easily conformed to\nthe different parts of the robot body. Its ability to estimate contact force components and to provide a tactile map with an accurate\nspatial resolution enables the robot to handle both unintentional collisions in safe human-robot collaboration tasks and intentional\ntoucheswhere the sensor is used as human-machine interface. In this paper, the authors present the characterization of the proposed\ntactile sensor and they show how it can be also exploited to recognize haptic tactile gestures, by tailoring recognition algorithms,\nwell known in the image processing field, to the case of tactile images. In particular, a set of haptic gestures has been defined to test\nthree recognition algorithms on a group of 20 users. The paper demonstrates how the same sensor originally designed to manage\nunintentional collisions can be successfully used also as human-machine interface.
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