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Humans can discriminate surface roughness using fingertip’s touch. It is believed that surface roughness is perceived by static and dynamic deformation of human skin. Recent findings have shown that subcutaneous slowly adapting mechanoreceptor (SA) detect static deformation of finger skin. However, there are difficulties to infinitely increase density of SA in limited skin space. [1] So, we focused on dynamic deformation is related with rapidly adapting mechanoreceptor (RA). In the process of scanning surface of objects with fingertips, RA detects vibrations induced by skin deformation. In this study, we suggest that sensors mimicking roles of RA can detect surface roughness. We used a polymer having similar characteristics of skin surface that transduce physical vibrations into electrical signal. And an array of polymer structures discriminates surface roughness. In other researches, they were tried to use one mechanoreceptor to acquire total range of vibrations. From the point of view which RAs have different vibration sensing ranges, we divided range of vibration through polymer structures and analyzed frequency element.

This paper proposed a novel Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAM) actuator to solve critical problems that bring about buckling and disturb linear motion due to structure characteristics. The traditional PAM actuators in a relaxed state require an additional mechanism due to bucking. Also the PAM actuator need to precise external sensors. As a result, the size of the entire system is large and heavy, so it is difficult to miniaturize and integrate. Also the PAM actuators cannot be used in a small mechanism such as a robot hand tip. Therefor we proposed a novel PAM actuator that do not need to an additional mechanism such as link, joint, tendon and transmission and external sensors in order to eliminate these problems.