Development of a Soft PZT Based Tactile Sensor Array for Force Localization

The need of designing tactile sensors for machines and robotic systems has become crucial with the increase of the tasks related to human. This work proposes a silicone embedded, low profile piezoelectric sensor array that is suitable for applications where tactile sensing and force localization is needed. The developed sensor has 3 piezoelectric ceramics (PZT) placed in 1x3 array and consists of 5 layers including flexible electrodes and silicone layers. The fabricated tactile sensor has 5 mm spatial resolution and has 0.578-0.821 V/N sensitivity range with a linear characteristic under 0-1 N impulse forces. Also the repeatability of the sensor is approximately 95.65 percent. In this work, the design of the sensor is presented. Each PZT element subjected to impulse force input has been calibrate and a force localization experiment has been performed on the sensor. The results show that our proposed sensor can be used as a force localization sensor.