Experimental testbed for robot skin characterization and interaction control

This thesis presents the research and work we conducted with an experimental testbed designed for testing and characterizing various types of robot skin with tactile sensing. The main goal of this research is to develop reduced-order models of robot skin for use in physical human-robot interaction simulations. The reduced-order models are developed from data collected by the testbed.;The experimental testbed presented is designed around a National Instruments compactRIO (cRIO). The cRIO controls and reads from a linear actuator and can collect synchronous measurements from multiple force sensors. The software developed for different test scenarios is also presented.;Experiments were conducted on force sensors, force sensors embedded in robot skin, and different materials for robot skin. Models built from these experiments are presented and validated through further testing.