Analysis of electrical resistance tomography measurements for fast force localization

Abstract Safe human-robot collaboration requires the robot to monitor the location and intensity of a potential contact force. This is necessary to avoid a possible risk of injury to humans. The goal of this work is to develop a distributed sensor system that enables spatially resolved force measurement. By covering the entire robot’s surface with an elastic coating with a sufficiently pressure-dependent conductivity, electrical resistance tomography can be used for this purpose. The measurement of the transimpedance makes it possible to localize a force applied between the electrodes and thus increase the spatial resolution of the measuring system. By analyzing the obtained measurements, a fast method, compared to classical electrical resistance tomography, for force localization is proposed. This method is compared to the classical method of electrical resistance tomography. A reduction in the processing time to less than one tenth has been attained with the presented method for the case of force localization only.