Vibration mode design for precision improvement of triaxial tactile measurement using individual vibratory microcantilever sensor

Vibration mode design has been proposed for precision improvement of triaxial tactile measurement using a piezoelectric vibratory microcantilever sensor. The single vibratory cantilever embedded in an elastomer material detects three dimensional tactile vector components applied on the elastomer surface through its resonant frequency shifts in three independent resonant modes. The key issue of the precision of the tactile measurement is nonlinearity in the sensor response as the frequency change to the applied tactile load, and the authors have developed an evaluation method of a resonant mode for nonline-arity reduction in the sensor response. Two new resonant modes have been developed according to the evaluation results. The conventional resonant mode configuration has been redesigned by using the newly developed modes and the measurement precision has been improved in the tactile vector estimation error from 33.6% down to 11.8%.