Abstract-Recently, several three-axial MEMS-based force sensors have been developed. This kind of force micro sensor is also called tactile sensor in literature for its similarities in size and sensitivity with human mechanoreceptors. Therefore, we believe these three-axial force sensors being able to analyse textures properties while sliding on a surface, as would do a person with his finger. In this paper, we present one of these sensors packaged as an artificial finger, with a hard structure for the bone and a soft rubber for the skin. Preliminary experiments show a good sensitivity of the finger, as its ability to sense the periodic structure of fabrics or to differentiate papers from fabrics calculating a friction coefficient. Its performance for discrimination of different surfaces is then estimated on fine textures of 10 kinds of paper. Supervised classification methods are tested on the data. They lead to an automatic classifier of the 10 papers showing good performances.

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Microfluxgate sensors are intended for the measurement of the very small variations of the earth magnetic field. Our sensors would present an output signal with a basic noise of about 1 nanotesla (nT)/ Hz, if an additional noise in the form of instabilities didn't regularly occur, increasing the output noise by regular jumps of 100 nT in the output signal. Some solutions are presented here to reduce and finally to suppress this problematic noise.Index Terms-Magnetic noise, magnetic sensor, magnetic thin film, noise.

Locating buried small diameter sealines (say < 10") with conventional geophysical methods has always been a problem for the off-shore oil industry. Standard towed survey tools, based on reflection seismics or proton magnetometers, suffer from their lack of resolution and sensitivity. The towed magnetometer, developed