Comb Shaped Multi-Functional Tactile Sensor For Material Discrimination

This paper presents a novel multi-functional tactile sensor. It has a mono-structure, but has three kinds of sensing functions for discriminating material properties and a touch force sensing function which is a basic function in a tactile sensor. The proposed sensor is used to discriminate typical materials such as iron, aluminium, copper, brass, rubber, acrylic resin, styrene foam and so on.The sensor consists of two comb shaped metallic lines on both faces of a thin insulated substrate with eight terminals. From different combinations of these terminals, the four sensing functions discribed above can be realized.The experiments show good results to discriminate each sample of materials. The proposed sensor is expected to serve as a step toward the development of an artificial skin tactile sensing system in the future.