Electronic skin with shape sensing and Bending-Insensitive pressure sensing for soft robotic grippers object recognition

• Published in: Measurement : journal of the International Measurement Confederation 2024-07, Vol.234, p.114819, Article 114819
• Main Authors: Meng, Xiangyu, Tang, Hongyao, Lü, Xiaozhou, Shi, Yaoguang, Bao, Weimin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Contact surface information detection; Curvature sensing; Electronic skin; Object recognition; Pressure sensing; Soft robotics
• ISSN: 0263-2241; 1873-412X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.measurement.2024.114819

•A dual-mode electronic skin with bend-insensitive pressure sensing units and highly sensitive curvature sensing units is proposed.•The electronic skin can detect pressure in the range of 0–––7.5 N and curvature in the range of 0–––0.5 cm−1.•The electronic skin can be used for soft robotic grippers' contact surface information detection.•The application of electronic skin in soft robotic grippers proves its applicability and lays the groundwork for future adaptive operation and control. Soft robotic grippers rely on accurate contact surface information to perform gripping and sorting tasks safely. Difficulty in obtaining accurate contact surface information for recognizing objects with a single type of sensor hinders the advanced capabilities of soft robotic grippers. To obtain contact surface information more accurately for object recognition, in this paper a shape-pressure dual-mode electronic skin for contact surface detection of soft robotic grippers is proposed. It consists of pressure sensing units and curvature sensing units. The pressure sensing unit is insensitive to curvature through an ingenious structural design. It can detect pressure in the range of 0–––7.5 N with a measurement error of 3.92 %. The curvature sensing unit can detect curvature in the range of 0–––0.5 cm−1 with a sensitivity of 63.66 % / cm-1. The experimental results show that the electronic skin can help the soft robotic gripper obtain information on the contact surface. The electronic skin is expected to accelerate the application of soft robots in advanced tasks such as recognition and classification.