Finite Element Method Based Toolchain for Simulation of Proximity Estimation Using Electronic Skin

Abstract The emergence of new areas of human-robot cooperation creates the need to ensure human safety in this regard. Therefore, there is a need to develop new sensors to detect the presence of a human in the vicinity of a robot. One such sensor is an electronic skin (e-skin). Manufacturing and testing new e-skin prototypes is labor-intensive. This paper presents a software toolchain developed to simulate the operation of an e-skin used to detect human proximity. The toolchain is based on the finite element method and has been developed exclusively with free and open-source software. The presented toolchain makes it possible to test e-skin modifications without the need for a physical prototype and significantly reduces implementation costs. The developed solution is multi-platform and allows parallel and multi-threaded calculations conducted on multiple machines simultaneously. This paper presents modeling results obtained for a simplified e-skin sensor, which are consistent with experimental results on the actual model.