Development of Flexible Tactile Sensor Array

In this paper, we present an arrayed flexible tactile sensor, which can detect contact normal forces as well as positions. The tactile sensor is developed using Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) that is known as piezoelectric polymer, and the surface electrode is fabricated using silk-screening technique with silver. We develop a charge amplifier in order to amplify the small signal from the sensor, and a fast signal processing unit by using a DSP chip. The developed tactile sensor is physically flexible and it can be deformed three-dimensionally to any shape so that it can be placed on anywhere on the curved surface. In the future, the developed sensor is applied to a dexterous robotic hand...$\textbullet$ Tactile sensing, PVDF, Robot hand