Development of a polymeric capacitive 3-D tactile sensor.

In this paper, we present a novel polymeric 3-D tactile sensor. The tactile sensor comprises of a flexible quad capacitor array where three axial forces can be measured from the sensors' relative areas and gap distances changes using a simple differential equation. To improve the overall performance of the sensor, several high dielectric polymers were developed so that a smaller sensor area (< 1×1cm(2)) can be achieved. A specially designed LC circuit was also developed to improve the capacitance detection. With the current configuration, the sensor is capable of detecting forces in any arbitrary direction with a sensitivity of 0.1N and a force range up to 45N.