Design and Fabrication of Soft-bodied 3-D Tactile Sensors with Magnetometers

The paper presents a uniquely designed force sensor which works on the concept of hall effect. Force measurement sensors are used in many areas where there’s a need to detect force with high precision and low sensitivity. Mostly force measurement sensors can be used as the slip detection sensors which are used in medical robotics. The developed sensor compromises of the main body structure with which the curved silicon layer is attached and works as a highly sensitive force sensing element. In the middle of that layer, a MAG3110 magnetometer is molded. Silicon layer works as the artificial sensing skin which helps in making the sensor more sensitive. All the difficulties we faced while fabrication and experimentation are discussed. Overall it’s a low cost easy to fabricate a highly sensitive sensor. On performing various experiments the calculated sensitivity of the sensor is around half an mN for a magnetic object and around 1mN for a nonmagnetic object. The idea of a damped spring-mass system is used to detect the distortion in the magnetic field thereby finally detecting the impact of force. The sensor can be used as a tri-axial force measurement sensor and slip detection sensor which can be widely applied in the areas of industrial robotics, rehabilitation robotics, surgical robotics etc.