Research and design of a novel, low-cost and flexible tactile sensor array

At present, the flexible tactile sensor array has become a hot research topic in the field of robotics. This paper introduces the design, fabrication and measurement of a novel tactile sensor array based on soft materials and sensor’s piezoresistivity. This sensor array is capable of detecting the contact force and contact location via a triangular location algorithm. This triangular algorithm, which uses response of different sensing elements to a contact force, can reduce the amount of processing data and the density of the sensor array can get lower. The flexible pressure sensing elements are integrated in a flexible PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) film, which can avoid the limitation that traditional rigid sensing elements have during their bending deformation. The sensor array’s performance has been experimentally evaluated. The results show that the proposed sensor array has an accuracy of 88.23% for the force and spatial resolution of the sensor array can reach 2.5 mm.