Hardware
Our team has implemented hardware based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays that does not need external Analog-to-Digital converters.
It is based on the direct connection of the sensors and the measurement of time intervals determined by the variable to be registered. Since the FPGAs have many I/O pins, they allow a very direct connection between the tactile sensor and the device. The performance of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is between ASICs and microcontrollers. They are flexible devices because they can be programmed, and at the same time they have a high dynamic performance due to the parallel processing they allow . The main advantage of this strategy is the possibility of performing a quite complex pre-processing in real time. As the system becomes more and more complex, many tactile sensors are used, for instance in fingers and palms, so the huge amount of data provided by these sensors should be pre-processed for the main controller to be able to manage it in real time. Moreover, signal conditioning circuits based on a PSoC and a microcontroller have also been made.