The design and fabrication of a flexible three-dimensional force sensor skin

To obtain shear and normal stress information on non-planar surfaces has long been a significant challenge. This paper described a new version of flexible tactile sensor skin for three-dimensional force measurement. The sensor array has been fabricated by MEMS technology. The sensor skin which can be bended 90 includes 4x4 force sensor cells. Each cell is hybrid integrated to flexible printing circuit board which consists of a E-shape diaphragm( 50 mu m thick and 4000 mu m wide). Each cell exhibits a sensitivity of 228 mv/N to normal force and 34 mv/N to shear force in the designed force range of 2N. Design analysis, fabrication processes, and experimental results are presented in this paper.