A 3D Printed Robotic Finger with Embedded Tactile Pressure and Strain Sensor

In this paper a simple and low-cost 3D printed robotic finger is presented. The 3D printed finger is embedded with a low-cost flexible piezoresistive polymer for sensing pressure and a thread-based carbon coated strain sensor for tracking the bending of the finger. The fingers are 3D printed with fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers using polymer composites thereby enabling low cost, high speed and simplicity. Design of a single such 3D printed finger is discussed and results are shown for the embedded pressure and strain sensors using a simple highly linear analog readout circuit.