A tactile sensor using three-dimensional structure

A tactile sensor for artificial fingertips utilizing a 3-D structured elastic body combined with vertical sampling pressure probes as a built-in feature extraction unit is proposed. The sensor uses orthogonally arranged vertical sampling probes and variable contact, realized by a flexible spherical surface. Using this architecture, three algorithms are proposed for the sensing surface texture, 2-D rubbing velocity, and deepness of contact, respectively. The architecture and the algorithms are examined in several experiments using a scaled-up model of the sensor