New tactile sensor for position detection based on distributed planar electric field

To achieve uninterrupted detection of position contacting with robot environment, this paper proposes a new type of tactile sensor. The sensor was developed with the principle of distributed planar electric field based on the uniqueness of steady electric field. The coordinate of contact position can be obtained from the potential value distributed on the planar electric field. The tactile sensor has a non-array structure, and consists of two conductive layers, an insulating layer and two viscoelastic layers. The feasibility was verified by the finite element simulation with COMSOL software and the sensor sample fabrication. The robot application experiments on an industrial robot arm with six degrees of freedom shows that the sensor has good accuracy of position detection and high space resolution. The sensor is thin and soft, easy to make and use, and has only 4 wires. Signal processing is also simple. It is capable of covering large areas of robot arms, and provides safety solutions for most robots.