The typical layout in a piezoresistive tactile sensor arranges individual sensors to form an array with M rows and N columns. While this layout reduces the wiring involved, it does not allow the values of the sensor resistors to be measured individually due to the appearance of crosstalk caused by the nonidealities of the array reading circuits. In this paper, two reading methods that minimize errors resulting from this phenomenon are assessed by designing an electronic system for array reading, and the results are compared to those obtained using the traditional method, obviating the nonidealities of the reading circuit. The different models were compared by testing the system with an array of discrete resistors. The system was later connected to a tactile sensor with 8 × 7 taxels.
The most efficient way to carry out the reading of a set of resistive sensors is to organize them in an array form. This reduces the number of wires to the sum of the number of rows, M, and columns, N, and reading can be carried out using just M + N multiplexers and a single operational amplifier. The drawback in this procedure is the appearance of crosstalk (the influence of the resistance of some sensors on the measurements of others). Although different proposals have been presented in the literature to reduce this phenomenon, errors in determining the resistance values of each sensor still exist in all the proposals. This article presents a new method to determine these values, which considerably reduces errors without the need for any hardware other than the simplest reading circuits. The method consists of a very fast recursive convergence procedure. The results show that the new proposal outperforms other solutions in the first or second step.
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