Design of a Large-Scale Soft Tactile Skin Using CNT-Coated Porous PDMS with a Trench Structure

Abstract

piezoresistive materials have been widely used for soft tactile sensors, but hysteresis is a major obstacle for using it in real applications. In this paper, we developed soft tactile sensor using CNT-coated porous PDMS with a trench structure. CNT-coated porous PDMS showed low hysteresis compared with conventional polymer-filler mixture. To reduce the crosstalk between electrodes, we propose a sensor structure that has trenches between the electrodes to reduce the unintended conductive pathways. It increased the resistance between the electrodes up to 20 times when the depth of the trenches are half of sensor thickness. This structure could be used for improving the spatial resolution of the array-indexing type tactile sensor.