Soft Magnetic Skin's Deformation Analysis for Tactile Perception

Abstract

Soft magnetic skins have been widely adopted for tactile perception due to their high accuracy and simple wiring advantages. However, the perceptual properties of magnetic skins are limited by information mapping relationships with weak interpretation. To overcome existing limitations, dynamic Young's modulus (DYM) is proposed in this paper based on strain energy density function to precisely describe the compression stiffness of magnetic skins. Furthermore, a highly interpretable and broadly applicable method is derived using DYM to analyze a cylindrical magnetic skin's deformation process as the skin deformed under external mechanic load. Extensive experiments in simulated and real situations with different deformations are carried out to verify the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that 0.14% and 0.43% relative errors in simulated and real environments, respectively, can be reached. Moreover, the proposed method can achieve minimum errors in almost all situations than data-driven or state-of-the-art analysis approaches. And the generality of the proposed method is validated by experiments conducted on skins with two different shapes. These promising results indicate the potential of the proposed method in establishing practical information mapping relationships for magnetic skins, probably addressing the significant challenges for magnetic skin application in complex scenarios.