Tunable Normal and Shear Force Discrimination by a Plant-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Soft Robotics

In plants, particular biomechanical protruding structures, tactile bleps, are thought to be specialized tactile sensory organs and sensitive to shear force. In this work, we present a 2D finite element analysis of a simplified plant-inspired capacitive tactile sensor. These preliminary results show that the variation of geometrical and material parameters permits to tune the sensitivity to normal and shear force and, with particular configurations, to discriminate between the two forces with a simple electrical layout and no signal processing.