Acoustic wave approach for multi-touch tactile sensing

Abstract

In this communication, we present a high resolution tactile plate that can localize one or two contact fingers. The localization principle is based on Lamb wave absorption. Fingers' contact will generate absorption signals while Lamb waves are propagating in a thin finite copper plate. These signals can be related to the contact positions and can be calibrated before the use of tactile plate. Fingers' contact positions are calculated by finding the closest calibration signal to the measured signal. Positions are carried out in less than 10 ms with a spatial resolution of 2 mm for one finger localization. Multi-points localization by this technology is developed and a two-point case is initialized and tested. Several optimization methods are also presented in this paper, as the double validation check which could improve the accuracy of single-point localization from 94.63% to 99.5%.