Abstract
Soft material structures exhibit high deformability and conformability which can be useful for many engineering applications such as robots adapting to unstructured and dynamic environments. However, the fact that they have almost infinite degrees of freedom challenges conventional sensory systems and sensorization approaches due to the difficulties in adapting to soft structure deformations. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel method which designs flexible sensor morphologies to sense soft material deformations by using a functional material called conductive thermoplastic elastomer (CTPE). This model-based design method, called Strain Vector Aided Sensorization of Soft Structures (SVAS3), provides a simulation platform which analyzes soft body deformations and automatically finds suitable locations for CTPE-based strain gauge sensors to gather strain information which best characterizes the deformation. Our chosen sensor material CTPE exhibits a set of unique behaviors in terms of strain length electrical conductivity, elasticity, and shape adaptability, allowing us to flexibly design sensor morphology that can best capture strain distributions in a given soft structure. We evaluate the performance of our approach by both simulated and real-world experiments and discuss the potential and limitations.
Highlights
Soft materials are capable of high deformations and conformity to unstructured forms which makes them interesting and useful for robotic applications [1,2]
As it is not always possible to have a structured environment with external optical sensors like cameras, recently, alternative approaches which relied on embedding sensors in the soft structures have been proposed [12]
Similar sizes are chosen: all of the soft structures have three layers of voxel surfaces, with each voxel having a cubic shape of 1.5 mm in size, while the square and plus having 45 voxels on each side and circle having 45 voxels on its diameter
Summary
Soft materials are capable of high deformations and conformity to unstructured forms which makes them interesting and useful for robotic applications [1,2] These soft bodied robots can flexibly deform and significantly change their shapes to accomplish tasks like locomotion in unstructured environments or manipulation of complex objects. Driven by tactile sensing [13,14,15] and bio-medical applications [16], there has been important research on soft sensors. While some of these sensors can detect one type of stimulus like multi-axis strain [17,18], there has been studies which show multimodal sensing such as pressure and force [19,20], shear and normal force [21,22] and strain and pressure [23]
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