Fingertip force and contact position and orientation sensor

This paper presents a novel integrated system that is composed of a fingerprint sensor and a force sensor to measure contact position and orientation of the fingertip along with the contact force. The system uses fingerprints from the fingerprint sensor to identify the contact position and orientation with fingerprint features such as core point and ridge orientations. The contact position and orientation are represented in a fingerpad coordinate system for grasping studies. An experiment has been designed to evaluate the proposed system in terms of accuracy and resolution with three subjects. The proposed system can be used in human grasping studies to characterize the fingerpad contact.