Abstract
The goal of this research is to develop a fail-safe safety tactile sensor using a viscoelastic tube and an ultrasonic signal, which is flexible and detectable a wide area with high reliability. As a fundamental experiment, in this paper, the propagation characteristics of an ultrasonic signal in a bending viscoelastic tube are investigated. Through the experimental results, we could drive the estimation equations of the rate of sound pressure loss and propagation time delay due to a tube curvature, and found that there was strong correlation between the coefficient of the sound pressure loss rate and time delay. The effectiveness of the estimation method was confirmed through an experiment. In addition, self-diagnostic algorithm was also proposed to realize a self-diagnosis of the sensor system.
