Rubber artificial skin layer with flexible structure for shape estimation of micro-undulation surfaces

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a wearable tactile sensor for measuring the shape of micro-undulations on a hard surface. The proposed sensor has two layers. The inner one is a thin rubber layer into which a strain gauge is embedded that is formed around a user’s finger. The outer layer is a flexible structure that consists of numerous pins on a flexible sheet. The shape of micro-undulations on an object surface can be measured when a user wearing the sensor traces the surface. The results of an experiment, in which we compare the cases with and without the flexible structure of the sensor, show that our proposed sensor is sufficiently accurate to measure the shape of micro-undulations due to its flexible structure, which contributes significantly to improving its signal-to-noise ratio.