Force measurement based on dielectric elastomers for an intelligent glove providing worker assessment in the digital production

Abstract

Due to recent progress in human-machine interaction towards industry 4.0 applications, the development of interfaces ensuring a safe collaboration between handling devices and workers is gaining a significant attention. For such applications, integration of wearable and highly stretchable actuator/sensor elements permits to endow the handling system with advanced and intelligent features. This paper presents on the development of a novel intelligent glove system which makes use of highly stretchable dielectric elastomer (DE) transducers as textile-integrated actuator and sensor components. The presented DE system can be used, e.g., as an adaptive assistance tool suitable for industry 4.0 environment. As a first step towards the development of the intelligent glove prototype, this paper mainly focuses on DE-based integrated force measurements. Different concepts for DE-based force measurements are presented and compared. Some of these sensing strategies are then selected, and their performance compared within the context of human-machine interaction and user interfaces.