electronic circuit board

Tactile sensors are used to detect force on a surface such as a robot’s hand or human skin. These sensors are usually made of piezoresistive materials and they convert a physical change into an electronic signal. This is then fed into a microcontroller to process the information. There are many different types of tactile sensor. The most common ones use a change in capacitance between two capacitor electrodes, but there are also other types that use resistance, thermal, or light. They are mostly used in robotics and for planetary exploration.

In order to get the best performance out of these sensors, they need to be properly conditioned. The frontend of the sensors (the electrodes) and the backend electronics must be matched. The frontends should be flexible and have a high analog-to-digital converter. The backend should be able to read multiple sensors at once and should be capable of handling the signal from large arrays.

The challenge of electronic circuit board pairing a frontend and backend that works well together is exacerbated when the system involves an extensive array of sensors. For example, the sensor in Figure 1 has 16 x 16 pairs of electrodes. A simple approach is to have a separate reading circuit for each sensor, but this can be expensive in terms of hardware and area. A more efficient approach is to have a single readout circuit that can handle a large number of sensors at once.

Can electronic circuit board be used in tactile sensors?

This is possible by using a unified backend that can perform the function of both a flexible transducer frontend and an analog-to-digital converter. A unified backend can also be more effective than an individual frontend for certain metrics. Two essential metrics that can be evaluated are the lowest overshoot (LOD) and maximum mean square error (MSE).

Using the unified backend, it is possible to achieve good results for a wide range of frontends without requiring additional hardware. The authors have tested the sensor with both a low-resolution and a high-resolution frontend and found that the unified backend has similar sensing performance to the individual frontends.

Another way to improve the sensor performance is to reduce crosstalk between adjacent tacels. This can be accomplished by using a special layout that uses multiplexers to control the rows and columns of the sensor. This will cancel the crosstalk caused by parasitic paths in the addressing tracks between adjacent tacels.

In this work, the authors have developed a novel tactile sensor that is flexible, low-resolution, biocompatible, and can cover large areas. They have also demonstrated a sliding tactile perception by concurrently analyzing the distinct outputs of each sensor. As an object slides across the sensor, the velocity of the sliding motion can be inferred by observing the order of the output changes in each sensor. In addition, the direction of the sliding motion can be determined by evaluating the relative order of the output changes between adjacent sensors. This new tactile sensor has the potential to improve soft robots and provide more tactile feedback.