Soft robot perception: fabrication and deployment of a flexible capacitance sensor array

PECRE Award Holder: Delin Hu, Univeristy of Edinburgh

Exchange Host: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

The most important feature of soft robots is that they are able to exploit softness and compliance of their bodies, like creatures in nature. This quality enables them to have more advantages than conventional rigid robots in terms of safety, manoeuvrability and availability in unstructured environments. Perception is a fundamental ability of intelligent robots, which enables them to understand states of themselves and environments. It is an essential factor to ensure safe and effective interaction among robots, humans and environments.

Unfortunately, perception approaches of traditional rigid robots cannot be trivially applied in soft robots. The reason is twofold. First, sensors designed for rigid robots will limit the flexibility of soft bodies. Moreover, perception of soft robots must consider many factors which can be ignored in rigid scenarios, such as deformation and hysteresis of soft materials. Although some related studies have been carried out recently, the state of the art is still far from the level of an acceptable solution and the issue remains challenging.

With the support from the SRPe, our group will build close connection with Soft Transducers Lab in EPFL. We will work together to design and fabricate a flexible capacitance sensor array for soft robot perception with stretchable conductive materials such as liquid metal, conductive polymer/hydrogel, nanocomposites and so on. The sensor array then will be deployed to a realworld soft manipulator and experiments will be carried out for characterization and evaluation purposes. Our final goal is to develop a flexible sensor system that can meet the requirements and challenges