Development of an elastic tactile sensor emulating human fingers for tele-presentation systems

Abstract

We have developed a tactile sensor for tactile tele-presentation systems by focusing on four features of the human finger considered to play an important role in texture perception; the existence of nails and bone, the multilayer structure of soft tissue, the distribution of mechanoreceptors, and the deployment of epidermal ridges. As a result, the developed sensor could detect roughness, softness and friction known to constitute texture perception of humans with precision equivalent to human. In addition, our sensor can be equipped with robot hands as it satisfies the requirements such as size equivalent to human finger, durability to withstand the wearing for repeated use, correspondence for scanning two dimensions.