Bionic Compound Eye-Inspired High Spatial and Sensitive Tactile Sensor

Haptics plays an important role in grasping and manipulating objects for human hands and artificial robotic hands. The density of tactile receptors at the tips of the fingers is very high, reaching 140 units/cm
²
. However, the density of the existing tactile sensors is very low. To increase the density of the 3-D tactile sensor, a novel high-density arrayed and curved 3-D tactile sensor based on bionic compound eye with the density up to 42 units/cm
²
is proposed in this article. The tactile sensor can detect both normal force and shear force since it is isotropic. The force measurement setup has been successfully built with a sensitivity of 0.000280 mN/Gray for normal force and 0.0262 N/ μm for shear force. The sensor will provide a technical basis for force measurement of surgical robots and manipulators.