A flexible and low-cost tactile sensor for robotic applications

For humans, the sense of touch is essential for interactions with the environment. With robots slowly starting to emerge as a human-centric technology, tactile information becomes increasingly important. Tactile sensors enable robots to gain information about contacts with the environment, which is required for safe interaction with humans or tactile exploration. Many sensor designs for the application on robots have been presented in literature so far. However, most of them are complex in their design and require high-tech tools for their manufacturing. In this paper, we present a novel design for a tactile sensor that can be built with low-cost, widely available materials, and low effort. The sensor is flexible, may be cut to arbitrary shapes and may have a customized spatial resolution. Both pressure distribution and absolute pressure on the sensor are detected. An experimental evaluation of our design shows low detection thresholds as well as high sensor accuracy. We seek to accelerate research on tactile feedback methods with this easy to replicate design. We consider our design a starting point for the integration of multiple sensor units to a large-scale tactile skin for robots.