Flexible tactile sensor with contact force sensing and surface texture recognition abilities is crucial for robotic dexterous grasping and manipulation in daily usage. Different from force sensing, surface texture discrimination is more challenging in the development of tactile sensors because of limited discriminative information. This paper presents a novel method using the finite element modeling (FEM) and phase delay algorithm to investigate the flexible tactile sensor array for slippage and grooved surfaces discrimination when sliding over an object. For FEM modeling, a 3 × 3 tactile sensor array with a multi-layer structure is utilized. For sensor array sliding over a plate surface, the initial slippage occurrence can be identified by sudden changes in normal forces based on wavelet transform analysis. For the sensor array sliding over pre-defined grooved surfaces, an algorithm based on phase delay between different sensing units is established and then utilized to discriminate between periodic roughness and the inclined angle of the grooved surfaces. Results show that the proposed tactile sensor array and surface texture recognition method is anticipated to be useful in applications involving human-robotic interactions.
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