LED touch sensors?

[spin_cycle]

this is just me thinking outlandishly crazy cos i hardly know anything about electronics bit i saw this idea use LED's to make an array for a touch pad and it made me think could this potentially be a cheap way to give the robonova a multi touch sensitive skin? crazy i know but still cool, heres a video:

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html

heres somewhere whith more info on it:

http://projects.dimension-x.net/technol ... edsensors/

im sure you guys can put this info to more use than me.

[bauermech]

He'd definitely be bright!

[Humanoido]

Years ago, I built a tiny digital oscilloscope using an LED array. It was a TIL unit 5x7 if I remember correctly and very tiny. It's function was to serve as the screen to display the rise and fall of the amplitude signal. It actually worked quite well and I added XY controls to adjust it and calibrate a baseline. Since these have 35 LEDs in a nice tight array, and have low power consumption, it would make an ideal photovoltaic sensor. One could easily fit it into the palm of a robonova hand, giving touch sensitivity. It could probably pick up an egg. It could use one of the digital potentiometer chips to calibrate its sensitivity automatically under microcontroller control.

I also built touch sensors using conductor foam, available to package electronic circuits and individual ICs. As the material is compressed, an ohms reading will vary. It's possible to work up a sensitivity chart of values. The better material will quickly spring back into shape and is the most desireable. I used this type of skin sensor technology for my full scale robot hands made in the 70s and 80s.

You're probably too young to know but there was a first wave of robotics hobbyists back in the early 80s. They published articles within the pages of the early computing magazines. I remember entering my robot in the Worlds First International Personal Robotic Conference (IPRC) and meeting Nolan Bushnell who was marketing B.O.B. (Brains on Board). BOB, at one convention rolled out onto its debut stage and flashed some lights, made sounds, and uttered some audibles. But the audience said, "Good, now show us what it can do!" It wasn't like Robonova and couldn't do acrobats. It's so fascinating now, to see a second wave of robotics interest, especially since robots can now walk.

Another idea about the LED sensors is that they can be controlled in on/off states to conserve power. The humanoid probably does not need to have palm sensors online when he's walking, for example. They can be shut off, thus saving on power consumption.

I hope this helps.
Sorry, I got carried away a little...
Humanoido

[Robo1]

that's so cool.

I can think of millions of things I could do with this tech on my bot.

you're be able to see it from miles around. Will have to experiment at the weekend and see what i can do.

bren

[DirtyRoboto]

The RN1 already has built in pressure sensors to govern the amount of force used to hold or grip an item.
It can be told to locate an object and confirm that a grip is possible, then execute a grip.
Why do you think the servos are sooo expensive!

The SkInput (c)2007 would need a very fast controller board and the RN1 does not have this.


Marcus.

[Humanoido]

That's a very useful feature of a servo. I saw one amazing Robonova video where he was expertly programmed to shake hands, and sensed the human's hand moving the robot's hand.

I wonder what sample code would look like, in the most simple form, for one servo in sense mode?

Humanoido