Experimental characterization of dedicated front-end electronics for piezoelectric tactile sensing arrays

Embedding electronics with tactile sensors may enable electronic skin to be applied in many domains such as prosthetics, robotics, industrial automation. The complexity of electronics from size and power consumption point of view represents the main barrier towards achieving goal. This paper provides the experimental characterization of dedicated front-end electronics for piezoelectric tactile sensing arrays. Aiming to decrease the hardware complexity, the designed circuits are based on the DDC112U and an FPGA Xilinx Spartan-6 devices. An experimental setup has been implemented to acquire the signal generated from a tactile sensor. Results validate the functionality of the proposed interface when the measured voltage and charge are analyzed in terms of the input force. Experimental characterization demonstrates the correctness of the results when the signal to noise and distortion (SINAD) ratio, and the effective number of bits (ENOB) have been analyzed.