Design, Analysis and Modeling of Flexible Arrayless Tactile Sensor under Sharp Contact

The flexible tactile sensor, as the important medium of human-robot interaction, its accuracy of the contact position and force has a vital impact on the intelligence and security of the system. For now, the existing traditional flexible capacitive pressure sensors mostly adopt array structure, however, which is still unable to meet all the requirements of easy manufacture, low cost, and simple structure. This paper innovatively introduces a flexible array-less capacitive sensor which can recognize both contact position and contact force under sharp contact. The position information is identified by measuring voltage change in real time and the contact force under sharp contact is identified by measuring the change of capacitance using the theory of elastic contact mechanics. The simulation and verification results show that the proposed flexible array-less capacitive sensor can accurately identify the contact position and force under sharp contact, which also verify the effeteness of the proposed measuring method. The proposed flexible array-less capacitive sensor is simple and robust, which has broad application prospects in wearable devices, biomedical devices, artificial intelligence robots and other related fields.