Simultaneous Acquisition of Viscous and Elastic Proparties by Single Measurement Scan of Fingertip-Type Tactile Sensor

In this paper, we successfully demonstrated a new tactile sensing principle in which an ultra-sensitive fingertip MEMS tactile sensor can simultaneously and independently acquire the viscosity and elasticity of an object while acquiring tactile sensations on the object surface. Human skin and flexible materials are viscoelastic bodies, and the ratio of viscosity to elasticity is very important in evaluating their tactile characteristics. We focused on the influence of sensor scanning speed during tactile sensation measurement and succeeded for the first time in extracting the viscous component and measuring the elasticity at the same time by changing the scanning speed. This technology is expected to be applied to various fields such as diagnosis and treatment in medicine.