Mems-Based “Touch Feeling Scanner” for Quantitative Evaluation of Fingertip Sensation

This paper reports a very high-performance tactile sensor system (Touch Feeling Scanner) that can easily and precisely measure the fine surface textures of various kinds of samples. Since human's fingertip can discriminate surface texture below $100 \mu \mathrm{m}$ range easily, it is considered that spatial resolution higher than $100 \mu \mathrm{m}$ is required for the sensors to reproduce the sense of touch on our fingertips. Since such precise measurement usually requires precisely driven stage, there are limitations on the sample shape, the size, and the measurement location of the samples. In order to realize both high special resolution and high adaptability to many applications, MEMS high resolution tactile sensor that we had developed is integrated in the “Touch Feeling Scanner” with novel measurement mechanics in this study. Attitude stabilization mechanism, crawler-type distance detector, and signal processing units for acquiring output signals from the tactile sensor are combined for precise measurement on samples. The completed system of touch feeling scanner showed significant performance reproducing the original performances of high-resolution tactile sensor evaluated with a motorized precise stage.