Shear Stress Sensor for Soft Material with Built-In Piezoelectric Polymer Films

Currently, it becomes more important to anticipate the intention of the user who touches the product. However, in case of the soft material, the internal deformation and stress distribution, which is the information of the way of touch, are hard to be estimated nor observed using current interactive shear force sensors except for limited situations. In this study, we developed a sensor system, which is embedded in the soft material and measures shear deformation and stress distribution inside of soft material. The validity of this sensor system, which consists of the array of piezoelectric sensors of Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), was tested by measuring the stress distribution of an artificial human skin.