TACTILE SENSING ARRAYS FOR HUMANOID ROBOTS USING PIEZO-POLYMER-FET DEVICES

摘要

This work presents a novel approach for developing high density tactile sensing arrays for the fingertips of humanoid robot. Each touch sensing element or “taxel” comprises of piezoelectric polymer film acting as transducer and directly deposited on the FET devices in the array. The tactile sensing arrays have been designed to have 25 touch sensing elements placed 1mm (center to center) away from each other thereby achieving the spatial resolution close to human fingertips. The size of each touch element is 0.5mm x 0.5 mm. The feasibility of the approach was studied by developing piezoelectric polymer-MEA (microelectrode array) based test chips – each comprising of 32 “taxels” (tactile elements) epoxy-adhered with a piezoelectric polymer (PVDF-TrFE) film. The experimental results from these tactile sensing arrays have also been presented.