Modeling and Analysis of a Novel Flexible Capacitive-Based Tactile Sensor

In recent years, autonomous robots have been increasingly deployed in unstructured and unknown environments. In order to survive in theses environments, robots are equipped with sensors. One of the main sensors is tactile sensor which provides the robots with tactile information like texture, stiffness, temperature, vibration and normal and shear forces. In this paper, we propose a flexible capacitive tactile sensor which is designed for measuring both normal and shear forces. The tactile sensing unit consists of five layers, a bottom layer of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) with a pillar, two copper electrodes embedded into a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) film, a spacer, a Polyimide (PI) film and finally a top PI bump. The bump and the pillar structure play a significant role in producing a torque for shear force measurement. Finite element modeling (FEM) is conducted to analyze the deformation of the sensing unit and simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics. The change of capacitance verse normal and shear forces are obtained, a comparison between the proposed sensor and other pervious sensor is conducted. The sensitivity of a cell is 0.22%/N within the full scale range of 10 N for normal force and 4%/N within the full scale range of 10 N for shear force.