A fiber optic microbend tactile sensor array

A new design for a fiber optic tactile sensor array is presented. In this design, optical fibers are used both as the actual force-sensing elements and as the signal-transmission media. The tactile array is formed by appropriately arranging fibers into four overlapping layers, two active layers sand- wiched between two corrugation layers, forming a two-dimensional grid of fibers. When force is imparted to a given fiber intersection, small dis- tortions (microbend) appear in the stressed fibers, resulting in decreases in transmitted light intensity in these fibers. A prototype sensor of this type has been constructed and tested. Comparison of the test results to desired tactile sensor charac- teristics and to a popular commercially available tactile sensor indicate that the prototype sensor performs very well, out-performing the commer- cial sensor in a number of the tested categories.