TACTILE IMAGE ACQUISITION BY A TOUCH SENSOR.

Our paper concerns the hardware implementation of a matrix touch sensing cells organised as an array of 16 multiplied by 16 elements. The designed cells use a conductive silicone material which, in this case, has the main property of producing a change in the resistance depending upon the stress applied on its surface. The pressure transformation to electric signal is carried out at each cell by using precisely sized and shaped electrodes. The lay-out of the electrodes set on a printed circuit board is realized in a decoupled fashion. This, consequently, permits to obtain an accurate measurement leading to easy computations. Tactile sensors mounted in the jaws of a gripper can produce tactile images of faces of a grasped object. Relevant parameters for the identification of the object faces can then be extracted from these images. The goal is to sense the position certain faces of the object, to verify that, the grasping operation has been correctly performed, with respect to the assembly specifications.