A two-ply polymer-based flexible tactile sensor sheet using electric capacitance.
Traditional capacitive tactile sensor sheets usually have a three-layered structure, with a dielectric layer sandwiched by two electrode layers. Each electrode layer has a number of parallel ribbon-like electrodes. The electrodes on the two electrode layers are oriented orthogonally and each crossing point of the two perpendicular electrode arrays makes up a capacitive sensor cell on the sheet. It is well known that compatibility between measuring precision and resolution is difficult, since decreasing the width of the electrodes is required to obtain a high resolution, however, this may lead to reduction of the area of the sensor cells, and as a result, lead to a low Signal/Noise (S/N) ratio. To overcome this problem, a new multilayered structure and related calculation procedure are proposed. This new structure stacks two or more sensor sheets with shifts in position. Both a high precision and a high resolution can be obtained by combining the signals of the stacked sensor sheets. Trial production was made and the effect was confirmed.
Tokai Rubber Industries, Ltd., 1 Higashi, 3-chome, Komaki-shi, Aichi-ken 485-8550, Japan. tri.guo@nagoya.riken.jp.
Shijie
S
Guo
Tokai Rubber Industries, Ltd., 1 Higashi, 3-chome, Komaki-shi, Aichi-ken 485-8550, Japan. takahisa.shiraoka@tri.tokai.co.jp.
Takahisa
T
Shiraoka
Tokai Rubber Industries, Ltd., 1 Higashi, 3-chome, Komaki-shi, Aichi-ken 485-8550, Japan. tosh@nagoya.riken.jp.
Seisho
S
Inada
RIKEN-TRI Collaboration Center for Human-Interactive Robot Research, RIKEN, 2271-130, Anagahora, Shimoshidami, Moriyama-ku, Nagoya 463-0003, Japan. tosh@nagoya.riken.jp.
Toshiharu
T
Mukai