A research on flexible pressure/temperature composite tactile sensor for electronic skin

Abstract

Tactile sensors, due to their unique advantages of high sensitivity, flexibility, and stability, have received increasing attention from researchers worldwide and hold great promise for application to a variety of fields, particularly electronic skin. However, the majority of tactile sensors are limited in their ability to meet the demand of their application to multi-variable tests due to their single-functionality. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel type of array pressure/temperature composite tactile sensor that functions without any interference. The pressure sensor is a capacitive pressure sensor with carbon-filled polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) serving as the intermediate dielectric layers. The temperature sensor, which is placed on the top of the pressure sensor with the two elements closely attached to each other, is a T-shaped thermocouple sensor fabricated by magnetron sputtering. PDMS filled with carbon materials has been shown to perform well overall in experiments. The sensor’s sensitivity is 85.5%/N within a pressure range of 0–2 N and 23.9%/N within a pressure range of 0–10 N, while the hysteresis is around 9.1%. Practical experiments are conducted to test the prepared device, and finally, the designed hardware circuit is connected to the IPC.