A Flexible Tactile Sensor Array Based on Conductive Rubber

Abstract

In this paper, a novel flexible tactile sensor array based on conductive rubber is presented. Compared with other research results, we use the materials with complete flexibility to fabricate the soft sensors. The sensing prototype includes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the sealing layers and conductive rubber as sensing layer. This proposed tactile sensor can measure the contact pressure under wrapping one curved surface. In our study, we developed a skin-like tactile sensor array from three aspects: design procedures, fabrication techniques and test results via taking one 8×8 sensor array for example, which is a sandwich structure and the sensing material was laminated into a thin encapsulation film with 2mm in thickness. Furthermore, the sensor overcomes the fabrication complexity, chemical unsafety and environmental instability problems to some extent. In the end, the final experimental demonstration verify the feasibility of the sensor array with discrete sensing elements in measuring the tactile force via matlab.