Summary
In this thesis, we present a design proposal and a prototype for a flexible, tile-based tactile sensing system for smart environments, called tacTiles. We begin with a comparison of existing approaches for tactile sensing in and on floor surfaces. As all investigated approaches failed to meet our requirements in some regards, we develop a novel design for a spatially resolved tactile sensing tile. We describe our method of arranging and connecting these sensors, and the bus system we developed to interconnects the individual tiles. As our system is based on custom force sensors based on conductive paper, we wished to evaluate the performance of these sensors to compare them to similar commercial ones. We describe the construction of a reference actuation setup and the subsequent evaluation. Furthermore, we use the setup to evaluate a PCB-based variant for future design, more modular designs. Finally, we presented two sonifications as example applications for the spatial pressure data of the tacTiles system.
A dedicated page on this project can be found
here