Abstract
Miniaturization and integration of tactile sensor elements have been considered so far, however the number of the sensors which are unified to the surface of a finger body is limitted. Also, most of them have blind sectors for sensing around the finger body. In order to solve these problems, we discussed requirements of sensors for dexterous fingers and developed a new tactile sensor having no blind sector. The sensor uses a suspension-shell covering the surface of the finger body which we call a suspension-shell mechanism. Tactile sense is obtained by detecting the relative displacement of the suspension-shell from the finger body. Sensor design, behavior of the suspension-shell, optical measurement of the relative displacement, and experimental results are shown.
