  Tactile sensing is of great importance during human hand usage such as object
exploration, grasping and manipulation. Different types of tactile sensors have
been designed during the past decades, which are mainly focused on either the
fingertips for grasping or the upper-body for human-robot interaction. In this
paper, a novel soft tactile sensor has been designed to mimic the functionality
of human palm that can estimate the contact state of different objects. The
tactile palm mainly consists of three parts including an electrode array, a
soft cover skin and the conductive sponge. The design principle are described
in details, with a number of experiments showcasing the effectiveness of the
proposed design.
