Flexible Electronics Sensors for Tactile Multi-Touching

Flexible electronics sensors for tactile applications in multi-touch sensing and large scale manufacturing were designed and fabricated. The sensors are based on polyimide substrates, with thixotropy materials used to print organic resistances and a bump on the top polyimide layer. The gap between the bottom electrode layer and the resistance layer provides a buffer distance to reduce erroneous contact during large bending. Experimental results show that the top membrane with a bump protrusion and a resistance layer had a large deflection and a quick sensitive response. The bump and resistance layer provided a concentrated von Mises stress force and inertial force on the top membrane center. When the top membrane had no bump, it had a transient response delay time and took longer to reach steady-state. For printing thick structures of flexible electronics sensors, diffusion effects and dimensional shrinkages can be improved by using a paste material with a high viscosity. Linear algorithm matrixes with Gaussian elimination and control system scanning were used for multi-touch detection. Flexible electronics sensors were printed with a resistance thickness of about 32 μm and a bump thickness of about 0.2 mm. Feasibility studies show that printing technology is appropriate for large scale manufacturing, producing sensors at a low cost

Lost Oscillations: Exploring a City’s Space and Time With an Interactive Auditory Art Installation

Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2016)Lost Oscillations is a spatio-temporal sound art installation that allows users to explore the past and present of a city's soundscape. Participants are positioned in the center of an octophonic speaker array; situated in the middle of the array is a touch-sensitive user interface. The user interface is a stylized representation of a map of Christchurch, New Zealand, with electrodes placed throughout the map. Upon touching an electrode, one of many sound recordings made at the electrode's real-world location is chosen and played; users must stay in contact with the electrodes in order for the sounds to continue playing, requiring commitment from users in order to explore the soundscape. The sound recordings have been chosen to represent Christchurch's development throughout its history, allowing participants to explore the evolution of the city from the early 20th Century through to its post-earthquake reconstruction. This paper discusses the motivations for Lost Oscillations before presenting the installation's design, development, and presentation

A Model that Predicts the Material Recognition Performance of Thermal Tactile Sensing

Tactile sensing can enable a robot to infer properties of its surroundings, such as the material of an object. Heat transfer based sensing can be used for material recognition due to differences in the thermal properties of materials. While data-driven methods have shown promise for this recognition problem, many factors can influence performance, including sensor noise, the initial temperatures of the sensor and the object, the thermal effusivities of the materials, and the duration of contact. We present a physics-based mathematical model that predicts material recognition performance given these factors. Our model uses semi-infinite solids and a statistical method to calculate an F1 score for the binary material recognition. We evaluated our method using simulated contact with 69 materials and data collected by a real robot with 12 materials. Our model predicted the material recognition performance of support vector machine (SVM) with 96% accuracy for the simulated data, with 92% accuracy for real-world data with constant initial sensor temperatures, and with 91% accuracy for real-world data with varied initial sensor temperatures. Using our model, we also provide insight into the roles of various factors on recognition performance, such as the temperature difference between the sensor and the object. Overall, our results suggest that our model could be used to help design better thermal sensors for robots and enable robots to use them more effectively.Comment: This article is currently under review for possible publicatio

A Soft Tactile Sensor Based on Magnetics and Hybrid Flexible-Rigid Electronics

Tactile sensing is crucial for robots to manipulate objects successfully. However, integrating tactile sensors into robotic hands is still challenging, mainly due to the need to cover small multi-curved surfaces with several components that must be miniaturized. In this paper, we report the design of a novel magnetic-based tactile sensor to be integrated into the robotic hand of the humanoid robot Vizzy. We designed and fabricated a flexible 4 × 2 matrix of Si chips of magnetoresistive spin valve sensors that, coupled with a single small magnet, can measure contact forces from 0.1 to 5 N on multiple locations over the surface of a robotic fingertip; this design is innovative with respect to previous works in the literature, and it is made possible by careful engineering and miniaturization of the custom-made electronic components that we employ. In addition, we characterize the behavior of the sensor through a COMSOL simulation, which can be used to generate optimized designs for sensors with different geometries

Artificial Tactile System and Signal Processing for Haptic applications

Human have the ability to interact with the external environment through five main senses which are vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Most of all, the sensation like vision or hearing have been well developed and the use of various applications like TV, Camera, or artificial cochlear have been widely generalized. As the next steps, recently, the tactile sensor to mimic the tactile system of human have been attracted by many groups. Especially, after the development of Apple’s iPhone, the public interest about touch sensing applications have been increased explosively. Other researches for tactile sensing have focused on enhancing the performance of tactile sensor like the sensitivity, stability, response time and so on. As a result, there are some researches that the sensor performance of certain criteria is better than that of human tactile system. However, a human tactile system is not only very sensitive but also complex. In other words, ultimately, the tactile system mimicking the human tactile sensation should detect various parameters such as the pressure, temperature, hardness or roughness and also decide the psychological feeling like the pain by a hot material in touching or the smooth/roughness feeling in sliding the certain material. Therefore, in this thesis, it has been studied for the development of multifunctional tactile sensing system detecting various tactile parameters and deciding the kinds of psychological tactile feeling by measured stimulation. As the first step for the development of tactile system, we have studied the tactile sensor using ZnO nanowire. Therefore, in this chapter, the basic characteristics of ZnO nanowire are investigated to confirm the possibility for the tactile sensor. In addition, structural design factors of sensor units have been studied in order to enhance the sensitivity of ZnO nanowire-based tactile sensor. We have primarily demonstrated the effect of a square pattern array design in a pressure sensor using ZnO nanowires. Nanowires grown on the edge of cells can be bent easily because of growth direction, density of nanowires, and buckling effect. Since smaller square pattern arrays induce a higher circumference to cell area ratio, if one sensor unit consists of many micro-level square pattern arrays, the design enhances the piezoelectric efficiency and the sensitivity. As a result, 20um × 20um cell arrays showed three times higher pressure sensitivity than 250um × 250um cell array structures at a pressure range from 4kPa to 14kPa. The induced piezoelectric voltage with the same pressure level also increased drastically. Therefore, the smaller pattern array design is more appropriate for a high-sensitive pressure sensor than a simple one-body cell design for tactile systems, and it has the advantage of better power efficiency, which is also important for artificial tactile systems. Even if, in previous experiments, the possibility of piezoelectric materials as the tactile sensor and the method for the enhancement of pressure sensitivity are confirmed well, the tactile sensor for mimicking the human tactile sensation should measure various parameters as well as the pressure. However, many studies about ‘smooth-rough’ sensation depend on the machine learning technology with simple tactile sensors rather than developing the sensors that can measure various parameters like surface topography, hardness, quality of materials at the same time. Therefore, after the development of the pressure sensor, specific structures based on PDMS are proposed to measure and analyze above-mentioned parameters related to ‘smooth-rough’ decision, as like fingerprint of human. To find the optimized structure, three kinds of the structure shape (cone, cylinder and dome) are fabricated and the pressure sensitivity according to the shape are also measured. FEM simulation is also carried out to support the experimental result. Our tactile sensor with optimized dome structure (500um height) provides high shear force sensitivity, fast response time, stability, and durability. The high sensitivity about the shear force enables better the tactile sensor to measure the various surface information such as the pitch of pattern, the depth, the sliding velocity, the hardness and so on. In addition, after the study to measure the various surface information by dome structure, the research to measure the other surface information is also followed. In our previous study, we confirmed that the surface topography can be reconstructed by mapping the piezoelectric signals according to the location. In this research, to reduce the number of measurements from dozens to once and minimize the data loss at the empty space between adjacent sensors, the electrode array of Zig-Zag type is applied to the tactile sensor. As a result, with just one measurement, the surface topography of broad region can be successfully reconstructed by our tactile sensor as the high-resolution image. Additionally, the temperature sensor based on the resistive mechanism is fabricated between the Zig-Zag electrode lines to measures the temperature of surface materials when the tactile sensor rubs on the materials in real time. Over the development of the tactile sensing applications, the demand for an artificial system like human tactile sensation have been much more increased. Therefore, in this study, as a surrogate for human tactile sensation, we propose an artificial tactile sensing system based on the developed sensors in previous sections. For this, the piezoelectric tactile signal generated by touching and rubbing the material is transferred to DAQ system connected with our tactile sensor. First, the system decides whether the contacted material is dangerous or not. If dangerous like sharp or hot materials, the warning signal is generated by our artificial tactile system. If not, the sensor connected with the system rubs the materials and detects the roughness of the materials. Especially, the human test data related to ‘soft-rough’ detection is applied to a deep learning structure allowing personalization of the system, because tactile responses vary among humans. This approach could be applied to electronic devices with tactile emotional exchange capabilities, as well as various advanced digital experiences. In this thesis, human-like tactile sensing system based on the piezoelectric effect is successfully confirmed through various experiments. Although there are still some issues that need to be improved, this research is expected to be fundamental results for human-like tactile sensing system detecting a variety of the parameters such as the pressure, temperature, surface morphology, hardness, roughness and so on. In the future, through collaborative research with other fields like brain science, signal processing, we hope that this research can mimic psychological tactile sensations and communicate emotional exchange with external environment like real human skin.YList of Contents Abstract i List of contents iii List of tables vi List of figures vii Ⅰ. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Various transduction mechanisms for the tactile sensor 5 1.2.1 Capacitive mechanism 5 1.2.2 Resistive mechanism 6 1.2.3 Triboelectric effect 7 1.2.4 Piezoelectric effect 9 1.3 Objectives 12 1.4 Reference 13 II. BASIC CHARACTERISTICS AND THE METHOD FOR ENHANC-ING THE PRESSURE SENSITIVITY OF THE TACTILE SENSOR BASED ON ZnO NANOWIRE 19 2.1 Introduction 19 2.2 Basic characteristics of ZnO nanowire 22 2.3 Device Fabrication 31 2.4 Morphological and Electrical characteristics 33 2.5 Pattern structure for enhanced for pressure sensitivity 38 2.6 Simulation result of piezoelectric effect for pattern structure 42 2.7 Reference 46 III. DOME STRUCTURE TO MEAUSRE THE SURFACE INFOR-MATION 52 3.1 Introduction 52 3.2 Basic characteristics of P(VDF-TrFE) 53 3.3 Device fabrication 61 3.4 Interaction mechanism between dome structure and surface material 63 3.5 Simulation and Experimental result comparing cone, cylinder, and dome structure 64 3.6 Simulation and Experimental result of the sensitivity enhancement ef-fect by dome structure 66 3.7 Depth measurement by tactile sensor with dome structure 72 3.8 Pattern of pitch by multi-array tactile sensor with dome structure 77 3.9 Hardness measurement by the tactile sensor with dome structure 79 3.10 Reference 83 IV. ZIG-ZAG ARRAYED TACTILE SENSOR BASED ON PIEZOE-LECTRIC-RESISTIVE MECHANISM TO DETECT THE SURFACE TOPOG-RAPHY AND TEMPERATURE 87 4.1 Introduction 87 4.2 Device fabrication 88 4.3 Piezoelectric characteristics of fabricated tactile sensor 90 4.4 Surface rendering method by the piezoelectric effect 95 4.5 Surface rendering result of 3D printed materials 96 4.6 Temperature sensing in sliding the high temperature material on Zig-Zag tactile sensor 99 4.7 Reference 103 V. TACTILE SENSING SYSTEM FOR PAIN AND SMOOTH/ROUGH DETECTION 105 5.1 Introduction 105 5.2 Components of the tactile sensing system 107 5.3 Artificial tactile sensing system for generating the pain warning 108 5.4 Artificial tactile sensing system for smooth/rough sensing 112 5.5 Reference 117 VⅠ. CONCLUSION 120DoctordCollectio

Digital fabrication of custom interactive objects with rich materials

As ubiquitous computing is becoming reality, people interact with an increasing number of computer interfaces embedded in physical objects. Today, interaction with those objects largely relies on integrated touchscreens. In contrast, humans are capable of rich interaction with physical objects and their materials through sensory feedback and dexterous manipulation skills. However, developing physical user interfaces that offer versatile interaction and leverage these capabilities is challenging. It requires novel technologies for prototyping interfaces with custom interactivity that support rich materials of everyday objects. Moreover, such technologies need to be accessible to empower a wide audience of researchers, makers, and users. This thesis investigates digital fabrication as a key technology to address these challenges. It contributes four novel design and fabrication approaches for interactive objects with rich materials. The contributions enable easy, accessible, and versatile design and fabrication of interactive objects with custom stretchability, input and output on complex geometries and diverse materials, tactile output on 3D-object geometries, and capabilities of changing their shape and material properties. Together, the contributions of this thesis advance the fields of digital fabrication, rapid prototyping, and ubiquitous computing towards the bigger goal of exploring interactive objects with rich materials as a new generation of physical interfaces.Computer werden zunehmend in Geräten integriert, mit welchen Menschen im Alltag interagieren. Heutzutage basiert diese Interaktion weitgehend auf Touchscreens. Im Kontrast dazu steht die reichhaltige Interaktion mit physischen Objekten und Materialien durch sensorisches Feedback und geschickte Manipulation. Interfaces zu entwerfen, die diese Fähigkeiten nutzen, ist allerdings problematisch. Hierfür sind Technologien zum Prototyping neuer Interfaces mit benutzerdefinierter Interaktivität und Kompatibilität mit vielfältigen Materialien erforderlich. Zudem sollten solche Technologien zugänglich sein, um ein breites Publikum zu erreichen. Diese Dissertation erforscht die digitale Fabrikation als Schlüsseltechnologie, um diese Probleme zu adressieren. Sie trägt vier neue Design- und Fabrikationsansätze für das Prototyping interaktiver Objekte mit reichhaltigen Materialien bei. Diese ermöglichen einfaches, zugängliches und vielseitiges Design und Fabrikation von interaktiven Objekten mit individueller Dehnbarkeit, Ein- und Ausgabe auf komplexen Geometrien und vielfältigen Materialien, taktiler Ausgabe auf 3D-Objektgeometrien und der Fähigkeit ihre Form und Materialeigenschaften zu ändern. Insgesamt trägt diese Dissertation zum Fortschritt der Bereiche der digitalen Fabrikation, des Rapid Prototyping und des Ubiquitous Computing in Richtung des größeren Ziels, der Exploration interaktiver Objekte mit reichhaltigen Materialien als eine neue Generation von physischen Interfaces, bei