DHu
Thu 28 Apr 2022, 13:00 - 14:00
Online Teams

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Mehrdad Yaghoobi Vaighan (myvaigha)

Image for Smart Capacitive E-skin Takes Soft Robots  beyond Proprioception

Proprioception, the ability to perceive posture, position, and movement, is a prerequisite for accurate body control in animals and robots. The lack of three-dimensional full-body proprioceptive sense has become a key constraint for fundamental breakthroughs in bioinspired soft robots. Here, we report a type of flexible capacitive e-skins to endow soft robots with high-resolution, full-geometry bodily awareness beyond existing proprioception systems. We demonstrate that our intrinsically-stretchable e-skin can capture complex three-dimensional deformations across the entire soft body through recursive, multi-position capacitance measurements. The e-skin signals can be directly translated to high-density point clouds portraying the complete geometry via the deep net. This augmented proprioception system providing millimeter-scale, global sensory-motor awareness can offer a crucial solution to fundamental problems in soft robotics, such as enabling precise closed-loop control and developing digital twins of soft robots.