Towards Artificial Robotic Skin: Highly Sensitive Flexible Tactile Sensing Arrays with 3D Sensing Capabilities

Abstract

Advanced tactile sensing will be one of the key enablers for more interactive and flexible robotics or prosthetics. We proposed a sensing technology, which aims for the replication of the human sense of touch by manufacturing dense arrays (100 sensors/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) of highly sensitive tactile sensors on a flexible substrate. In this work, we present the characterization of the sensor array with the developed readout electronics, which can resolve capacitance changes of 1.4 fF at an update rate of 5 kS/s and without crosstalk between different sensing cells. Based on those findings we study the sensor response upon actuation with 3D forces and show that they can be resolved.