Fabrication of a Flexible Tactile Sensor with Micro-Pillar Array

The tactile sensors are primarily used to measure the contact area and normal pressure of contacting two solids. The common deficiencies of the current tactile sensors are flexibility, adaptation to contacting bodies, normal and lateral resolution. In order to overcome these limitations, this work presents the fabrication of polymer meso and micro scale pillar arrays of integrated tactile sensor mimicking the adhesion mechanism found in geckos. The tactile sensor primarily consists of two layers which are a polymer micro-pillar array and a thin supporting backing layer of piezoelectric polymer with patterned electrodes. The sensitivity of the tactile sensor is measured to be 21.1 mV/N according to the best fit line to the experimental data's.