3D-SITS · 3D Stretchable Inductive Tactile Sensors for Soft Artificial Touch
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-06 → 2020-09-05
- EU contribution
- €180,277
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
3D Stretchable Inductive Tactile Sensors for Soft Artificial Touch
Tactile sensing are crucial for interactive robots and dexterous robotic manipulation, and are playing increasing important in smart surgical instruments, and wearable healthcare systems. Compared to visual and auditory senses, artificial touch sensors are relatively less-developed, due to the complexity of large number of sensing elements required. More crucially, tactile sensors must have both high compliance and high performance to be effectively applied in real-world environments. To survive the wearing and impact due to repeated physical contact, the sensing surface needs to be durable/resilient, while being compliant. In the last decades, remarkable progress has been made in developing 2D flexible sensing skins. A wide variety of different transducer mechanisms have been exploited to date, with common modalities including piezoresistivity/resistance, piezoelectricity, triboelectricity, capacitance, optics/laser, and magnetic field. Nevertheless, challenges remain in developing tactile sensors that can be truly soft (stretchable), durable, robust, and high-performance, ready for real-world applications. Resistance, capacitance and inductance are the three basic measurand for sensing systems. Compared to resistive and capacitive sensors, inductive sensors are quite overlooked due to the complex readout electronics and coil structure. In this project the fellow intend to investigate the fundamental physics and design principles of the overlooked inductive transducer mechanisms, and the utilization of them in different forms for developing various soft sensors and applications systems. The overall goal of this MSCA-IF project is to develop a robust, high-performance, truly soft, multimodal sensing technology: Stretchable Inductive Tactile Sensors (SITS), enabling them to be directly integrated into soft robots and wearable systems. This project investigates: a) the working principle and underlying physics, basic characteristics of inductive sensing mechanisms (self-/mutual inductance, eddy-current effect, magnetic reluctance, etc.); b) The design and fabrication techniques of various flexible and stretchable coils; c) Modeling of the inductive coils and sensing devices (numerical analysis and Finite element analysis); d) Development of inductive sensor prototypes and sensing systems; e) Applications of inductive sensing in soft robotics and wearable systems.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Tactile sensors are essential components that enable robotic systems to interact safely and effectively with humans and the environment, they also offer significant potential for use in modern healthcare systems. Compared to visual and auditory senses, the tactile sensory system provided by human skin are complex, combining large number of high performance, multi-modal sensory elements in soft 3D structures to extract information during interaction with objects. To be effectively applied in real-world environments, tactile sensors must have both high compliance and high performance, and also need to be durable and robust to the repeated physical interaction. Researchers seeking innovations in tactile sensing have explored and exploited new materials, novel composites/structures, fabrication techniques and transducer mechanisms. Although remarkable progress has been made in developing 2D flexible sensing skins, a third dimension in soft sensing technology should be investigated to emulate multimodal, highly sensitive receptors, and ultimately the human sense of touch. This action involves an experienced researcher, Dr Hongbo Wang, under the supervision of Dr Lucia Beccai for 24 months to work on the project “3D Stretchable Inductive Tactile Sensors for Soft Artificial Touch” (3D-SITS), at the Center for Micro-BioRobotics of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Italy. In this project, I propose to use elastomers with embedded helical coils and zig-zag planar coils to form multi-modal, stretchable sensing nodes. By investigating this overlooked transducer mechanism, together with novel design and fabrication techniques, that allow us to build truly soft, durable, high-performance, distributed, 3D tactile sensing systems at component level (artificial receptors) and then system level (soft robotics and wearable skin), providing a leap forward in the area of artificial touch for the next generation of robots, wearable systems and human–machine interfaces.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA · GenovaCoordinatorItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union