Polymer Micromachined Flexible Tactile Sensor for Three-Axial Loads Detection

Polymer micromachined multimodal tactile sensors

We present the design, fabrication process, and characterization of a multimodal tactile sensor made of polymer materials and metal thin film sensors. The multimodal sensor can detect the hardness, thermal conductivity, temperature, and surface contour of a contact object for comprehensive evaluation of contact objects and events. Polymer materials reduce the cost and the fabrication complexity...

A CMOS Compatible Micromachined Tactile Fingerprint Sensor

We present in this paper a novel tactile fingerprint sensor composed by a single row of microbeams realized by the way of front side bulk micromachining from a standard CMOS circuit. When the user passes his finger on the sensor, the ridges and the valleys that compose the fingerprint induce deflections in the different microbeams. Using a piezoresistive gauge placed at their base, the deflecti...

Three-axis Tactile Sensor

Real-time measurement of the three-axis contact force distribution using a flexible capacitive polymer tactile sensor

In this paper, we report real-time measurement results of various contact forces exerted on a new flexible capacitive three-axis tactile sensor array based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). A unit sensor consists of two thick PDMS layers with embedded copper electrodes, a spacer layer, an insulation layer and a bump layer. There are four capacitors in a unit sensor to decompose a contact force in...

Flexible and stretchable fabric-based tactile sensor

In this extended abstract we introduce a novel fabric-based, flexible, and stretchable tactile sensor, capable of seamlessly covering natural shapes. Our developed sensor can have an arbitrary perimeter, can cover freeform surfaces and remains operational on top of soft padding such as a gel cushion, which is a prerequisite for building human-like, soft artificial palm and finger sensors. We di...