Abstract
We report the development of a novel soft body touch sensor capable of measuring contact force along its length. The sensor can be embedded in soft objects and on curved surfaces for smart furniture, interactive electronics, and general robotics applications. The sensor uses pneumatic transduction principle and achieves both high sensitivity and impact loading tolerance. The development is motivated by the needs of consumer electronics industries for smart furniture and interactive toys. The current work fills a gap of existing soft-bodied touch sensors. The main sensor body is completely polymeric and contains no conductive or semiconducting material elements. It exhibits high pass frequency response to reject common mode contact forces or shape variations. The central question addressed by this paper is dynamic behavior of this sensor under normal and impact touch force. In this study we developed a theoretical model for the sensor output and validated with experimental measurements. We modeled sensor behavior under two operational regimes of different unloading speed. Depending on the rate of change, the sensor could be in force limited relaxation mode or elastic relaxation (free relaxation) mode. Measurements have been performed to capture time constants of occupant behavior in a smart cushion application.
Highlights
Touch sensors are used as robotic skin, smart cushion, gaming input devices, and toy interactive inputs
The pressure behavior is investigated under three conditions: (1) pressure response under pseudo steady state loading and unloading; (2) pressure response under rapid removal of contact deformation; (2) pressure dynamic response under even large impact that results in air particle release through a bleeding valve that is normally pinch closed
We present a novel belt-type soft touch sensor for the first time and established dynamic modeling for the behavior
Summary
Touch sensors are used as robotic skin, smart cushion, gaming input devices, and toy interactive inputs. Soft touch sensors have been made in the past, their realization and fabrication typically involve patterning of structural layers such as conductive elastomers [13] or liquid metal [14] This increases the production cost of the system especially for large area sensing. This pneumatic transduction principle offers several important advantages, addressing issues outlined earlier Using this device one is capable of measuring very low touch pressure while tolerating high impact loading. It uses an ultra-sensitive silicon pressure sensor with a low electronics noise amplifier to measure the contact event with high sensitivity. This sensor can be manufactured with controlled low cost and can cover a large area of curved surfaces conformally
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