A Discriminating Method of Three Mixed Tactile Information Using Pressure-Temperature Sensitive Materials

Abstract

For realizing an artificial skin-sensing device with multi-sensing functions, this paper proposes a discriminating method of three mixed tactile information, that is, contact force, temperature change and contact situation on surface models, using pressure-temperature sensitive materials despite one contact. The proposed discriminating method has two discrimination processing stages. First stage is a discrimination of only a temperature change. Second stage is a discrimination of a contact force and a contact situation at the same time. To demonstrate the proposed discriminating method, we adopted pressureconductive rubber sheets as pressure-temperature sensitive materials into tactile sensor materials because the rubber sheet has also a temperature dependency. A trial self-heating type pressure-conductive rubber tactile sensor is compared with one of the minute sense receptors of the human skin in this study. The ability of the trial tactile sensor was tested on various contact conditions using typical object samples. As experimental results, the usefulness of the proposed discriminating method was demonstrated.