Frequently Asked Questions
If you have any questions not included in the FAQ below, please write to
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or
contact us through any other communication channels.
When two objects are in physical contact, three-component forces arise between them:
pressure-like (normal) forces that are perpendicular to the surface and shear forces that are parallel with it. "Three-axial" denotes all the existing (one normal and two shear) force components. For more information, please visit the
technology section.
Commercially available, general tactile arrays measure only pressure,
namely, the force component perpendicular to the touched surface.
However, when frictional forces are present (and they are present in most of the cases),
shear forces contain additional information about the frictional states, the texture of the
touched object, pre-slip conditions, micro-vibrations caused by the slip, etc.
Therefore, the two extra measured force dimensions can highly extend our knowledge about
the physical contact between the sensor and the touched object.
Taxel (coming from "tactile pixel" or "tactile element") is the smallest item of information in a tactile image.
It is the analogue of the word "pixel" (picture element) used with visual images.
TactoLogic offers various tactile array configurations with up to 64 taxels.
TactoLogic sensors are generally designed to work in the force/pressure range of light dexterous manipulation.
The general loading range of a single taxel is usually somewhere between 0 and 1 N (0-100 grams) in all directions (normal and shear).
This maximal 1N local normal force value over one taxel is equivalent to 1 MPa pressure,
which corresponds to about 10 kg distributed weight on a fingertip size area.
The sensitivity of our sensors can be modified to some extent according to the user specifications.
TactoLogic sensors are analogue devices, the frequency range is mostly defined/limited by the read-out circuitry and/or your PC.
For a standard PC the read-out speed of all sensor types can be varied between 0 and 100 FPS (Hz) on the whole sensor array.
TactoSoft is a professional data acquisition and data analysis software that comes with TactoLogic three-axial tactile devices. TactoSoft can read out, display, record, play back and analyze three-axial tactile data. TactoSoft is designed to fulfill all the requirements the vectorial-type, three-axial tactile data demand.
Of course you can! All TactoLogic systems come with a general API to embed the read-out functions into your own code.
Also, the next generation of TactoLogic Masterboards (coming out in April, 2009) will be equipped with I2C interface to
use the sensors as embedded hardware.
