Pulsating fluidic sensor for sensing of location, pressure and contact area

Designing information-rich and space-efficient sensors is a key challenge for soft robotics, and crucial for the development of safe soft robots. Sensing and understanding the environmental interactions with a minimal footprint is especially important in the medical context, where portability and unhindered patient/user movement is a priority, to move towards personalized and decentralized healthcare solutions. In this work, a pulsating fluidic soft sensor (PFS) capable of determining location, pressure and contact area of press events is shown. The sensor relies on spatio-temporal resistance changes driven by a pulsating conductive fluid. The sensor demonstrates good repeatability and distinction of single and multiple press events, detecting single indents of sizes greater than 1 cm, forces larger than 2 N, and various locations across the sensor, as well as multiple indents spaced 2 cm apart. Furthermore, the sensor is demonstrated in two applications to detect foot placement and grip location. Overall, the sensor represents an improvement towards minimizing electronic hardware, and cost of the sensing solution, without sacrificing the richness of the sensing information in the field of soft fluidic sensors.