Development of Expandable Self-Capacitive Proximity and Tactile Sensor Module

Recently, collaborative robot which works in a same place with people has become attractive. We have proposed a self-capacitance proximity and tactile sensor for the safety and workability of collaborative robot so far. The sensor on the robot can detect an object before and after contact. In this paper, we propose a sensor module of the self-capacitance proximity and tactile sensor. The advantage of this sensor module is that an expansion and an implementation of the sensor are easy. This sensor module on the robot can detect objects before contact, and can detect pressure and its position after contact. The proposed sensor module may be useful system on collaborative robots.