Design and development of a novel 3D printed 1-DOF tactile sensor with conductive polymer based sensing element

Abstract

Tactile sensors provide vital information of robotics, manufacturing, and day to day household electronic appliances. Off the shelf force sensors are generally not cohesive to specific application requirements, resulting subsequently in sensor modules with unsuitable dimensionality, output characteristics, and mechanical properties. Encompassing these issues, rapid prototyping/ 3D printing could be utilised to develop highly customisable tactile sensors. In this paper, a novel sensor structure for a conductive polymer based tactile sensor has discussed. The inherent problems in conductive polymer piezoresistive characteristics such as operation range deviation w.r.t. chemical composition has mitigated.