Large-sized fabric tactile sensors for detecting contacted objects

The authors previously proposed a type of fabric tactile sensor produced by weaving artificial hollow fibres such as clothes. In this study, the authors enlarged its size by using a handloom and investigated the characteristic of the contacted object detection. The authors produced two kinds of fabric tactile sensors having different sizes 87.5×52.0×mm and 180.0×56.0×mm. The pitch values of the detection point at the horizontal and the vertical directions were 7.0 and 7.0×mm, respectively, in the former sensor, and they were 18.0 and 14.0×mm, in the latter one. The authors evaluated the detection performance of the developed fabric tactile sensors, and obtained that the variation of the sensor outputs among the detecting points was less than 1.5× when the concentrated force was applied to the each sensing point. The sensor output increased with increasing applied load, and it depended on the size of the contacted objects. From this result, the authors conducted that the sensor output was the same when the applied pressure on the fabric was the same, even if the contacted areas were different. The developed fabric sensor also successfully detected the two-dimensional shape of the contacted objects.