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Soft Self-Healing Fluidic Tactile Sensors with Damage Detection and Localization Abilities.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

George Thuruthel, Thomas  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0571-1672
Hughes, Josie 

Abstract

Self-healing sensors have the potential to increase the lifespan of existing sensing technologies, especially in soft robotic and wearable applications. Furthermore, they could bestow additional functionality to the sensing system because of their self-healing ability. This paper presents the design for a self-healing sensor that can be used for damage detection and localization in a continuous manner. The soft sensor can recover full functionality almost instantaneously at room temperature, making the healing process fully autonomous. The working principle of the sensor is based on the measurement of air pressure inside enclosed chambers, making the fabrication and the modeling of the sensors easy. We characterize the force sensing abilities of the proposed sensor and perform damage detection and localization over a one-dimensional and two-dimensional surface using multilateration techniques. The proposed solution is highly scalable, easy-to-build, cheap and even applicable for multi-damage detection.

Description

Keywords

soft robotic sensors, self-healing sensors, fluidic sensing, damage detection

Journal Title

Sensors (Basel)

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1424-8220
1424-8220

Volume Title

21

Publisher

MDPI AG
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) (828818)
This work was supported by the SHERO project, a Future and Emerging Technologies284(FET) programme of the European Commission (grant agreement ID 828818)