Paul Ericson offers a peek at a prototype of his Flex-Actuated Bistable Dome Shape Sensor array on his Website. Apparently this is not your typical tactile dome like we had in calculators in the 80's. Instead, they are actuated by flexure of the material holding the domes around the edges.

The current prototype has an array of individual sensors going to a matrix of LEDs to show the object being sensed. The next step would be to multiplex the sensors using a microcontroller embebbed into the sensor array itself and provide a simply high-level data stream back to the prosthetic limb or......robot.