エレクトレットを用いた外部電源不要な触覚機能を有する人工皮膚に関する研究

抄録

We propose a flexible artificial skin with a tactile function that requires no external power supply. The proposed skin is made from a lamination of an electret, an elastomer and two electrodes. The electret is a material in which electric charges are stored semi-permanently. In this study, an electret with a thickness of 15 μm was made by applying amorphous fluororesin on a 10 μm thick copper electrode. After that, an elastomer containing carbon black was applied to the opposite electrode with a thickness of 1.0 mm, and these were laminated to fabricated an artificial skin of about 1.1 mm. The results of experiments in which the pressure was applied to the prototype skin showed that the detected, voltage was 16 V, which was sufficient to use as a sensor for detecting the contact. Furthermore, a principle to detect the position of contact point is proposed and verified in simulation. In the future work, experiments to estimate the contact point will be carried out.