CMOS-on-LTCC integrated fingertip sensor with 3-axis tactile and thermal sensation for robots

Abstract

This paper reports a fully-integrated, small-footprint fingertip sensor, which allows robots to have 3-axis tactile and thermal sensation. The 3-axis capacitive force sensor is integrated with our original sensor platform CMOS-LSI (sensor platform LSI) including a diode-based temperature sensor. The LSI offers flexible configurability, and the force sensitivity and the sample rate were configured for this fingertip application. The materials of objects were successfully identified by measuring temperature change under the control of contact force. Fitting by a theoretical thermal model was conducted to extract contact resistance, thermal conductivity and thermal capacitance.