Discrimination of Object Curvature Based on a Sparse Tactile Sensor Array.

Object curvature plays an important role in grasping and manipulation. To be more exact, local curvature is a more useful information for grasping practically. Vision and touch are the two main methods to extract surface curvature of an object, but vision is often limited since the complete contact area is invisible during manipulation.

A Novel Inverse Solution of Contact Force Based on a Sparse Tactile Sensor Array.

High-density tactile sensing has been pursued for humanoid robotic hands to obtain contact force information while the elastomer skin cover is traditionally considered to impair the force discrimination. In this work, we try to utilize the diffusion effect of the elastomer cover to identify an arbitrary contact force load just based on a sparse tactile sensor array. By numerical analysis, we proved the monotonous relation between the Pearson's correlation coefficient and the relative distance of two single-force loads.

Flexible Piezoelectric Tactile Sensor Array for Dynamic Three-Axis Force Measurement.

A new flexible piezoelectric tactile sensor array based on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) film is proposed for measuring three-axis dynamic contact force distribution. The array consists of six tactile units arranged as a 3 × 2 matrix with spacing 8 mm between neighbor units. In each unit, a PVDF film is sandwiched between four square-shaped upper electrodes and one square-shaped lower electrode, forming four piezoelectric capacitors.