A flexible tactile sensor array with 6×6 N-type sensitive elements made of conductive rubber is presented in this paper. The property and principle of the tactile sensor are analyzed in detail. Based on the piezoresistivity of conductive rubber, this paper takes full advantage of the nonlinear approximation ability of the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) method to approach the high-dimensional mapping relation between the resistance values of the N-type sensitive element and the three-dimensional (3D) force and to accomplish the accurate prediction of the magnitude of 3D force loaded on the sensor. In the prediction process, the k-means algorithm and recursive least square (RLS) method are used to optimize the RBFNN, and the k-fold cross-validation method is conducted to build the training set and testing set to improve the prediction precision of the 3D force. The optimized RBFNN with different spreads is used to verify its influence on the performance of 3D force prediction, and the results indicate that the spread value plays a very important role in the prediction process. Then, sliding window technology is introduced to build the RBFNN model. Experimental results show that setting the size of the sliding window appropriately can effectively reduce the prediction error of the 3D force exerted on the sensor and improve the performance of the RBFNN predictor, which means that the sliding window technology is very feasible and valid in 3D force prediction for the flexible tactile sensor. All of the results indicate that the optimized RBFNN with high robustness can be well applied to the 3D force prediction research of the flexible tactile sensor.
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