Recognition of Contact State of Four Layers Arrayed Type Tactile Sensor by Using Neural Networks

Abstract

A tactile sensor having four layers is proposed, and the information processing method for this sensor using neural networks (NN) is investigated. The summary is as follows: 1) Imitating the human skin structure, an arrayed type tactile sensor composed of many force sensing elements distributed on four layers is proposed. 2) The micromachining process for the four layers sensor composed of many capacitive sensing elements is proposed. 3) The output data from the force sensing elements are simulated by FEM. 4) For recognizing the contact force, two stages NN, the first stage of which is for detecting force direction and the second stage of which is for detecting force magnitude, is proposed. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed by simulation. 5) The contact object shape is recognized by simulation, confirming the effectiveness of NN. 6) In both cases of force recognition and shape recognition, the sensor having four layers is confirmed to be superior to that having one layer, in the viewpoint of recognition accuracy. 7) A concept of module networks for detecting total contact state is proposed.