Output Characteristic of a Flexible Tactile Sensor Manufactured by 3D Printing Technique

Abstract

Flexible tactile sensors can provide valuable feedback to intelligent robots about the environment. This is especially important when the robots, e.g., service robots, are sharing the workspace with human. This paper presents a flexible tactile sensor that was manufactured by direct writing technique, which is one of 3D printing method with multi-walled carbon nano-tubes. The signal processing system consists of two parts: analog circuits to amplify and filter the sensor output and digital signal processing algorithms to reduce undesired noise. Finally, experimental setup is implemented and evaluated to identify the characteristics of the flexible tactile sensor system. This paper showed that this type of sensors can detect the initiation and termination of contacts with appropriate signal processing.