阅读说明：本技术 一种电阻式触摸传感器、电子皮肤和智能机器人 (Resistance-type touch sensor, electronic skin and intelligent robot ) 是由 孙滕谌 张大华 庄玮 于 2019-05-06 设计创作，主要内容包括：本发明涉及一种电阻式触摸传感器和智能机器人。本发明的触摸传感器包括多个传感器单元,每个传感器单元包括多个导电层,各导电层包含对应的一个区域；每个导电层的内部均设置有与所述导电层电连接的上层电极,所述上层电极的下方设置有与上层电极对应的下层电极；所述上层电极接激励信号,下层电极接模数转换电路；其中,所述上层电极为曲面弹性电极,所述下层电极为平面电极或曲面电极。其有益效果是：本发明能够不仅能够完整实现接触觉功能要求,还可以兼顾高灵敏和宽检测范围的要求。(The invention relates to a resistance-type touch sensor and an intelligent robot. The touch sensor of the present invention includes a plurality of sensor units, each sensor unit including a plurality of conductive layers, each conductive layer including a corresponding one of regions; an upper electrode electrically connected with the conductive layers is arranged in each conductive layer, and a lower electrode corresponding to the upper electrode is arranged below the upper electrode; the upper layer electrode is connected with an excitation signal, and the lower layer electrode is connected with an analog-to-digital conversion circuit; the upper electrode is a curved surface elastic electrode, and the lower electrode is a plane electrode or a curved surface electrode. The beneficial effects are as follows: the invention can not only completely realize the requirement of the touch function, but also meet the requirements of high sensitivity and wide detection range.)

1. A resistive touch sensor, characterized by: the touch sensor comprises a plurality of sensor units, each sensor unit comprises a plurality of conductive layers, and each conductive layer comprises a corresponding area;

an upper electrode electrically connected with the conductive layers is arranged in each conductive layer, and a lower electrode corresponding to the upper electrode is arranged below the upper electrode; the upper layer electrode is connected with an excitation signal, and the lower layer electrode is connected with an analog-to-digital conversion circuit; the upper electrode is a curved surface elastic electrode, and the lower electrode is a plane electrode or a curved surface electrode.

2. The resistive touch sensor of claim 1, wherein: the upper electrode and the conductive layer are integrally formed, or the upper electrode is electrically connected with the conductive layer through a conductive piece.

3. The resistive touch sensor of claim 1, wherein: the upper electrode is arranged independently of the conductive layer, and the upper electrode is electrically connected to the conductive layer by crimping, bonding, or riveting.

4. A resistive touch sensor according to any one of claims 1-3, wherein: the upper electrode comprises a curved surface elastic electrode, and the lower electrode comprises at least one plane electrode or curved surface electrode.

5. A resistive touch sensor according to any one of claims 1-3, wherein: the upper layer electrode comprises at least three curved surface elastic electrodes, the lower layer electrode comprises a plane electrode or a curved surface electrode, and the three curved surface elastic electrodes are mutually insulated.

6. A resistive touch sensor according to any one of claims 1-3, wherein: the curved surface elastic electrode is a spherical or ellipsoidal curved surface elastic electrode.

7. The resistive touch sensor of claim 6, wherein: the curved surface elastic electrode is a solid or hollow curved surface elastic electrode.

8. A resistive touch sensor according to any one of claims 1-3, wherein: the curved surface elastic electrode can be made of an elastic material made of one material, and can also be made of elastic materials made of various different materials, wherein the elastic material forming the outermost layer or the uppermost layer is an elastic material with conductivity.

9. The resistive touch sensor of claim 8, wherein: the curved surface elastic electrode is made of two elastic materials made of different materials, the inner part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a harder material, and the outer part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a softer material; or the upper part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of elastic materials made of harder materials, and the lower part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of elastic materials made of softer materials.

10. An electronic skin, comprising: a resistive touch sensor comprising any of claims 1-9.

11. A smart robot comprising the electronic skin of claim 10.

Technical Field

The invention relates to a resistance-type touch sensor, an electronic skin and an intelligent robot, which are applicable to the technical field of artificial intelligence.

Background

In recent years, intelligent robots have been developed to a large-scale practical stage in the industrial field, and the interaction of the intelligent robots with the outside world requires intelligent sensors simulating various sensory functions of human beings, mainly including: visual sensors, auditory sensors, tactile sensors, and olfactory sensors. To date, visual sensors and acoustic sensors have been developed to a maturity and are widely used in the field of industrial robots. However, as the intelligent robot is deeply expanded to various fields of human activities, particularly to the fields of agricultural robots, home service robots, medical service robots, hotel catering service robots and the like, the robot is required to be capable of completing more flexible and complex actions, and meanwhile, as the robots in the fields need to be in closer contact with human, the safety and comfort of the contact between the robot and the human must be ensured. Therefore, highly sensitive tactile sensors having human-like tactile functions are becoming more and more important. Various countries around the world have conducted extensive research on biomimetic tactile sensors.

The smart tactile sensor should have the following basic functions:

touch feeling: when the limbs of the intelligent robot are about to or just touch the external object, the external object about to or just touch the limbs of the intelligent robot can be roughly classified and the speed and the distance of the external object about to approach can be judged. For example: the service robot can distinguish that an object to be or just contacted is a human limb or other objects, the agricultural picking robot can distinguish that the object to be or just contacted is fruits, cotton or plant branches and leaves, and can judge the approaching speed and distance, so that the intelligent robot can properly control the initial speed of the limb approaching or contacting an external object to avoid damaging a human body to be contacted or damaging the object to be contacted.

Pressure and sliding sensation: when the limbs of the intelligent robot contact the external object, the magnitude and the direction of the three-dimensional pressure applied by the intelligent robot can be sensed, so that the intelligent robot can control the three-dimensional pressure applied by the intelligent robot to be in a proper range, for example: when the service robot lifts the teacup, the three-dimensional pressure applied to the teacup is controlled, so that the teacup is not crushed and does not slide. In addition, when the limbs of the intelligent robot slide on the external object, the sliding direction and sliding speed can be sensed, so that the intelligent robot can control the sliding direction and speed, such as: the massage service robot should be able to control the speed and direction of the palm sliding on the human body to an appropriate range.

Temperature and humidity sense: should be able to perceive the temperature of external environment and external object when the limbs of intelligent robot are close to or contact with external object to intelligent robot's self limbs do not receive high temperature or low temperature damage, protect its service object not receive high temperature or low temperature injury simultaneously, for example: when the service robot carries tea to the old or the patient, whether the temperature of the tea is suitable for the human to drink or not is judged; when the limbs of the intelligent robot approach to flames or high-temperature objects, the limbs of the intelligent robot can actively avoid the flames or the high-temperature objects. In addition, when the limbs of the intelligent robot approach or contact external objects, the humidity of the external environment and the external objects should be sensed, for example: the family service robot helps people to distinguish whether the clothes are dried or not when the clothes are dried.

In addition to the above basic functions, since all limbs of the biomimetic robot need to cover a large area of the biomimetic skin having a large number of touch sensors, the intelligent touch sensor needs to meet the requirements of miniaturization, low power consumption, and convenience in forming a sensor matrix.

The existing intelligent touch sensor technology research is divided according to the sensing principle and mainly comprises resistance type, capacitance type, photoelectric type, piezoelectric type, inductance type, micro-electromechanical type and composite type (composite of two or more principles). At present, the method is mostly in a laboratory research stage, the method is not mature to a practical stage, more and more research teams focus on resistance type, capacitance type and resistance-capacitance combined type along with the deep research, and the characteristics of simple manufacturing process, low cost, convenience for batch production and the like are close to maturity.

A purely resistive touch sensor is implemented using the principle of a flexible piezoresistive variable material (e.g., conductive rubber) that changes its resistivity when subjected to pressure, thereby reflecting the magnitude of the pressure. The advantages are that: the pressure sense, namely the sensing of the three-dimensional force can be realized, the manufacturing process is simple, the cost is low, the anti-interference capability is strong, and the mass production is convenient; but has the following disadvantages: the requirement of touch can not be realized almost, the object that contacts can not be classified and identified, the speed and the distance that can not judge when will contacting external object promptly are close, and sensitivity is on the low side, and the difficult control of product uniformity. The touch screen has certain market potential in some application fields with low requirements on touch and sensitivity.

The capacitive or resistance-capacitance composite touch sensor is the most promising development prospect at present, compared with other forms of touch sensors, the resistive touch sensor has unique advantages for realizing contact feeling, the resistive touch sensor utilizes the electric field theory, electric field lines of the resistive touch sensor can penetrate through and approach or contact with an external object, the external object is classified and identified by utilizing the characteristics that different objects have different dielectric constants, and particularly, the external object can be accurately distinguished to be a human body or other objects. The pressure-sensation and sliding-sensation capacitance type touch sensor has the advantages of high sensitivity, good consistency, easiness in manufacturing, low cost, easiness in matrix realization and the like. But the defects of the prior capacitive touch sensor technology are as follows:

first, all the requirements of the touch sensor cannot be fulfilled: the touch sense comprises classification recognition of external objects and judgment of the proximity of the external objects; pressure and slip, i.e., measurements of the magnitude and direction of three-dimensional forces; the temperature sensation and the humidity sensation.

Secondly, the interference resistance is poor, the three-dimensional force measuring device is easily influenced by ambient temperature, humidity and electromagnetic interference, the influence of the ambient temperature and humidity is usually eliminated by adopting a differential method when the three-dimensional force is measured, and the electromagnetic field interference resistance is improved by adopting an electromagnetic shielding method. Once electromagnetic shielding measures are adopted, although the anti-electromagnetic interference capability is effectively improved, the capabilities of classifying, identifying and judging the approaching speed and distance of external objects are lost, namely, the touch function cannot be realized.

Third, when forming a sensor matrix, electric field crosstalk of adjacent sensor cells cannot be avoided.

In recent years, researchers at home and abroad have published a lot of papers and patent documents, which can be roughly classified into the following 2 categories:

sensors that have only pressure and/or slip sensing capability, i.e. that are capable of measuring three-dimensional forces, are divided into two categories, shielded and unshielded: for example:

the patent with application number CN201410245030 discloses a fully flexible capacitive touch sensor, which uses the upper plate of a parallel plate capacitor as a shielding layer, and although the anti-interference capability is improved, because the internal electric field lines of the shielding layer cannot pass through the shielding layer, the functions of classification and identification and proximity of external objects are lost, and the touch feeling cannot be realized.

The patent publication No. US2008/0174321A1 discloses a capacitive sensor capable of simultaneously measuring object approaching and sliding senses, the sensor can work in two modes, the capacitive electrodes of the sensor adopt an upper layer structure and a lower layer structure, the upper layer of the capacitive sensor is a planar capacitor formed by two electrodes, the function of recognizing and identifying external objects in a contact sense classification mode can be realized, the measurement of the approaching degree of the external objects in the contact sense cannot be realized, the upper layer of the capacitive sensor and the lower layer of the capacitive sensor can form a parallel plate capacitor, the normal force measurement of the pressure sense can be realized, the tangential force measurement cannot be realized, and the patent cannot realize any anti-interference measures such as shielding or difference. Any anti-crosstalk measures cannot be implemented when forming a matrix.

Chinese patent application No. CN201810093946.5 discloses a resistive touch sensor, which includes a plurality of sensor units, each sensor unit includes an area included by 4 conductive layers, and the 4 conductive layers form two capacitors C1 and C2 for distinguishing the identification and proximity of an external object; two layers of electrodes are arranged in each conducting layer, and the two layers of electrodes form 4 parallel plate capacitors for measuring the size and direction of three-dimensional force, so that the patent can realize all functions of touch feeling; however, the detection range of the patent is limited, and the multi-stage sensing mechanism similar to a finger cannot be realized.

Disclosure of Invention

The present invention is directed to overcoming the deficiencies of the prior art and providing a resistive touch sensor.

The invention provides a resistance-type touch sensor, which adopts the technical scheme that:

the invention provides a resistance-type touch sensor, which comprises a plurality of sensor units, wherein each sensor unit comprises a plurality of conducting layers, and each conducting layer comprises a corresponding area;

an upper electrode electrically connected with the conductive layers is arranged in each conductive layer, and a lower electrode corresponding to the upper electrode is arranged below the upper electrode; the upper layer electrode is connected with an excitation signal, and the lower layer electrode is connected with an analog-to-digital conversion circuit; the upper electrode is a curved surface elastic electrode, and the lower electrode is a plane electrode or a curved surface electrode.

The invention provides a resistance-type touch sensor, which also comprises the following auxiliary technical scheme:

the upper electrode and the conductive layer are integrally formed, or the upper electrode is electrically connected with the conductive layer through a conductive piece.

The upper electrode is arranged independently of the conductive layer, and the upper electrode is electrically connected to the conductive layer by crimping, bonding, or riveting.

The upper electrode comprises a curved elastic electrode, and the lower electrode comprises at least one planar electrode or curved electrode.

The upper layer electrode comprises at least three curved surface elastic electrodes, the lower layer electrode comprises a plane electrode or a curved surface electrode, and the three curved surface elastic electrodes are mutually insulated.

Wherein, the curved surface elastic electrode is a spherical or ellipsoidal curved surface elastic electrode.

Wherein, the curved surface elastic electrode is a solid or hollow curved surface elastic electrode.

The curved surface elastic electrode can be made of an elastic material made of one material, and can also be made of elastic materials made of various different materials, wherein the elastic material forming the outermost layer or the uppermost layer is an elastic material with conductivity.

The curved surface elastic electrode is made of two elastic materials made of different materials, the inner part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a harder material, and the outer part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a softer material; or the upper part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of elastic materials made of harder materials, and the lower part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of elastic materials made of softer materials.

The invention also provides an electronic skin comprising a resistive touch sensor as defined in any one of the above.

The invention also provides an intelligent robot which comprises the electronic skin.

The implementation of the invention comprises the following technical effects:

according to the resistance-type touch sensor, the conductive layer is utilized, not only can all functions of the touch sensor be completely realized, but also the requirements of high sensitivity and wide detection range can be met.

Drawings

Fig. 1 is a schematic structural diagram of a resistive touch sensor according to the present invention.

Fig. 2 is a top view of fig. 1.

Fig. 3 is a cross-sectional view taken along the line a-a in fig. 2.

Fig. 4 is a partially enlarged view of a portion a in fig. 1.

Detailed Description

The present invention will be described in detail below with reference to embodiments and drawings, it being noted that the described embodiments are only intended to facilitate the understanding of the present invention, and do not limit it in any way.

As shown in fig. 1 to 4, the resistive touch sensor provided in this embodiment includes a plurality of sensor units, each sensor unit includes a plurality of conductive layers 1, and each conductive layer 1 includes a corresponding area;

an upper electrode 2 electrically connected with the conductive layer 1 is arranged in each conductive layer 1, and a lower electrode 3 corresponding to the upper electrode 2 is arranged below the upper electrode 2; the upper electrode 2 is connected with an excitation signal, and the lower electrode 3 is connected with an analog-to-digital conversion circuit; the upper electrode 2 is a curved elastic electrode, and the lower electrode 3 is a planar electrode or a curved electrode. In the resistive touch sensor in this embodiment, as the three-dimensional force increases, the upper layer curved surface electrode is deformed nonlinearly, which results in a change in the area and distance between the upper layer electrode and the lower layer electrode, and thus a change in the capacitance of the capacitor formed by the upper layer electrode and the lower layer electrode. According to the resistance-type touch sensor, the conductive layer can be used for completely realizing all functions of touch of the touch sensor, and the requirements of high sensitivity and wide detection range can be met.

In some embodiments, the upper electrode 2 is integrally formed with the conductive layer 1; or the upper electrode 2 is electrically connected with the conductive layer 1 through a conductive member, which may be a wire or a conductive rubber block.

In other embodiments, the upper electrode 2 is disposed separately from the conductive layer 1, and the upper electrode 2 is electrically connected to the conductive layer 1 by crimping, bonding, or riveting.

In some embodiments, the upper electrode 2 comprises a curved elastic electrode, and the lower electrode 3 comprises at least one planar electrode or curved electrode.

In other embodiments, the upper electrode 2 includes at least three curved elastic electrodes, the lower electrode 3 includes a planar electrode or a curved electrode, and the three curved elastic electrodes are insulated from each other.

The curved surface elastic electrode is a spherical or ellipsoidal curved surface elastic electrode, or the curved surface elastic electrode can be an electrode in any curved surface shape.

The curved surface elastic electrode can be a solid or hollow curved surface elastic electrode.

The curved surface elastic electrode can be made of an elastic material made of one material, and can also be made of elastic materials made of various different materials; for example: the curved surface elastic electrode is made of two elastic materials made of different materials, the inner part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a harder material, and the outer part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a softer material; or the upper part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a harder material, and the lower part of the curved surface elastic electrode is made of an elastic material made of a softer material, so as to better meet the requirements of high sensitivity and wide dynamic range at the same time, wherein the elastic material forming the outermost layer or the elastic material forming the uppermost layer is an elastic material with conductivity.

Another aspect of the present application also relates to an electronic skin comprising the above resistive touch sensor, since the improvement point relates to the sensor on the artificial skin only, and other components can adopt the technology which is more mature in the prior art. Therefore, other components of the e-skin will not be described in this application.

Yet another aspect of the present application relates to a robot comprising the above-mentioned electronic skin, since the improvement point relates to only the contact sensor on the electronic skin, and other components can adopt the technology well-established in the prior art. Therefore, other components of the intelligent robot will not be described in the present application.

Finally, it should be noted that the above embodiments are only used for illustrating the technical solutions of the present invention, and not for limiting the protection scope of the present invention, although the present invention is described in detail with reference to the preferred embodiments, it should be understood by those skilled in the art that modifications or equivalent substitutions can be made on the technical solutions of the present invention without departing from the spirit and scope of the technical solutions of the present invention.