SPATIAL RESOLUTION MAXIMIZATION FOR CAPACITIVE TACTILE SENSORS

Unlike conventional four-capacitor tactile sensors, this work presents a two-capacitor arrangement to reduce the size of sensing unit and to enhance the spatial resolution without losing sensitivity and accuracy. The shapes of the capacitors were simultaneously modified from squares to rectangles to realize balanced spatial resolutions in the x- and y-direction. Experiments showed identical results to the theoretical and simulation ones with less than 3 degrees angle detection error and 0.3 pF/N sensitivity. The maximized spatial resolution of the proposed two-capacitor tactile sensor was more than doubled compared to that of the conventional four-capacitor ones.