A novel thick-film piezoelectric slip sensor for a prosthetic hand

The ability to mimic the tactile feedback exhibited by the human hand in an artificial limb is considered advantageous in the automatic control of new multifunctional prosthetic hands. The role of a slip sensor in this tactile feedback is to detect object slip and thus provide information to a controller, which automatically adjusts the grip force applied to a held object to prevent it from falling. This system reduces the cognitive load experienced by the user by not having to visually assess the stability of an object, as well as giving them the confidence not to apply unnecessarily excessive grip forces. A candidate for such a sensor is a thick-film piezoelectric sensor. The method of fabricating a thick-film piezoelectric slip sensor on a prototype fingertip is described. The construction of experimental apparatus to mimic slip has been designed and analyzed to allow the coefficient of friction between the fingertip and the material in contact with the fingertip to be calculated. Finally, results show that for a coefficient of friction between the fingertip and grade 100 sandpaper of approximately 0.3, an object velocity of 0.025 +/- 0.008 ms(-1) was reached before a slip signal from the piezoelectric sensor was able to be used to detect slip. It is anticipated that this limiting velocity will be lowered (improved) in the intended application where the sensor electronics will be powered from a battery, connections will be appropriately screened, and if necessary a filter employed. This will remove mains interference and reduce other extraneous noise sources with the consequence of an improved signal-to-noise ratio, allowing lower threshold values to be used in the detection software.