柔軟素材に埋め込み可能なマイクロプレーナコイル触覚センサ

抄録

This paper describes design and fabrication of a small, thin and deformable tactile sensing unit including micromachined LC trap circuitry. One tactile sensing element consists of a capacitor and a planar spiral coil. Each element has own resonance frequency, and small deformation of the coil in the element is detected by measuring its frequency deviation. Only three wires are necessary to obtain signals from multiple sensing elements. Since the sensing elements do not need any substrate, they can be implanted in soft material. A prototype array of the sensing elements has been fabricated and tested. On condition that the sensing element is embedded in standard silicone rubber, its frequency sensitivity is 0.15%/mm. In the frequency band 50-400MHz, the experiment shows that a simultaneous measurement of not less than 20 elements can be done.