(A) soft somesthetic robotic finger based on 3D electrical resistance tomography and hydrogel

Abstract

It is reported that tactile and proprioceptive sensation increases human manipulability, and soft tissue compliance stabilizes the grasping function. Nevertheless, it is challenging to transpose this system to the small confined space of soft robotic fingers due to the fragile material properties, and complex wiring entailed. Furthermore, the soft robotic fingers also have difficulty performing such as in-hand manipulation cause of lack of sensor’s scalability on the curved, full covering structure compared to human skin. In this paper, we developed a soft somesthetic robotic finger based on electrical resistance tomography (ERT) and hydrogel. The rigid internal core has 32 electrodes for measuring the internal resistance of covering hydrogel, which is used as continuous deformable skin. Using 3D electrical resistance tomography with the predefined shape of the soft robotic finger, we can implement tactile and proprioceptive sensing on a fully covered, curved, and articular structured soft robotic finger. To evaluate the performance of our proposed soft robotic finger, we conducted an indentation experiment and bending experiment with 1DOF cable-driven actuation system with a flexure joint based under-actuated articular structure.