Decoupling Research of a Novel Three-Dimensional Force Flexible Tactile Sensor Based on an Improved BP Algorithm

Decoupling research on flexible tactile sensors play a very important role in the intelligent robot skin and tactile-sensing fields. In this paper, an efficient machine learning method based on the improved back-propagation (BP) algorithm is proposed to decouple the mapping relationship between the resistances of force-sensitive conductive pillars and three-dimensional forces for the 6 × 6 novel flexible tactile sensor array. Tactile-sensing principles and numerical experiments are analyzed. The tactile sensor array model accomplishes the decomposition of the force components by its delicate structure, and avoids direct interference among the electrodes of the sensor array. The force components loaded on the tactile sensor are decoupled with a very high precision from the resistance signal by the improved BP algorithm. The decoupling results show that the k-cross validation (k-CV) algorithm is a highly effective method to improve the decoupling precision of force components for the novel tactile sensor. The large dataset with the k-CV method obtains a better decoupling accuracy of the force components than the small dataset. All of the decoupling results are fairly good, and they indicate that the improved BP model with a strong non-linear approaching ability has an efficient and valid performance in decoupling force components for the tactile sensor.