A flexible fingertip tactile sensor

Tactile information is prerequisite for dexterous manipulation of objects with robots. In this paper a novel tactile sensor using dielectric elastomer is presented. The sensor is a capacitive type and it can be easily covered onto any curved surface due to the intrinsic flexibility of the dielectric elastomer. The practical design and fabrication of a tactile sensor for the robot fingertip are described in details in this paper. Also,a fingertip shaped tactile sensor with twelve tactile cells is developed. The sensor is mounted on a multi-fingered robot hand, called "SKKU Hand III", and its effectiveness is validated with experimental results.