A Flexible Tactile Sensor With Good Consistency

Abstract

In recent years, tactile sensors have experienced tremendous progress. Among them, piezoresistive tactile sensors using nanocomposites exhibit good flexibility and sensitivity. Due to their low cost and good performance, piezoresistive tactile sensors have great potential for large-scale commercialization. However, the drawbacks are equally obvious, i.e., poor consistency and low-sensing range. The fundamental reason is that conductive fillers have poor decentralization in polymer and lacks an effective structural design. To solve these problems, we compared six common organic solvents in the solution blending method to prepare the multi-walled carbon nanotubes/polydimethylsiloxane (MWCNT/PDMS) composite. The optimal organic solvent by comparing the dispersion performance of MWCNT and the stability of MWCNT/PDMS is presented. Moreover, the well-consistent tactile sensors were proposed and fabricated using the micro-electromechanical systems technologies. The sensitivity reached 6.25% KPa-1, and the reproducibility test of the same sensor has been performed. The result proves that the proposed schemes for nano-materials preparation and processing have greatly improved the consistency of the piezoresistive tactile sensors.

Keywords

• Humanoid robots
• tactile sensors
• microelectromechanical systems
• nanocomposites