A single composite of carbon and silicone allows a soft robotic hand to feel its own position and touch external objects simultaneously.
Soft robots no longer need bulky, separate sensors to understand their own movements. This new material provides both proprioception and exteroception through a single integrated system. The robot can sense where its fingers are while also detecting the texture of what it is holding. This mimics the dual-sensing capability of human skin and muscles. This breakthrough makes soft robots much simpler to build and more effective at handling delicate items.
DL-Driven Dual-Modal Proprioceptive-Exteroceptive Fusion for Multi-Joint Soft Grippers
SSRN · 6641654
Dexterous multi-joint pneumatic soft grippers are indispensable for daily object manipulation due to their inherent compliance. However, existing research suffers from a critical trade-off: multi-joint soft grippers only enable single-modal sensing, while dual-modal perception is limited to single-joint structures, which impedes precise control in complex scenarios. To address this issue, we propose the DM-BioGrip—a bio-inspired, deep learning (DL)-driven dual-modal proprioceptive-exteroceptive