Area touch sensor for dextrous manipulation

A novel touch sensor for robots is described which continuously reports location and magnitude of contact within the area of the sensor. The sensor can be made in many forms, including a flexible membrane which may be applied to planar, cylindrical, or conical surfaces of any size. The sensor is novel in that the location of contact within the large sensor area can be determined with arbitrary accuracy using only four wires per sensor (plus a potential lead which may be common to many sensors). The primary advantages of the sensor are sensitivity to light touch, ease of fabrication, and low cost. The expected dependence of sensor output on location, force of contact, and size of contact area has been investigated theoretically, and experiments with several bench-top implementations show excellent agreement with theory. Prototypes were sensitive to forces from as small as 2 g to several hundreds g. The sensor could have wide application in robotics, orthotics, and prosthetics