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Abstract

Soft robotic sensors have been limited in their applications due to their highly nonlinear time variant behavior. Current studies are either looking into techniques to improve the mechano-electrical properties of these sensors or into modelling algorithms that account for the history of each sensor. Here, we present a method for combining multi-material soft strain sensors to obtain equivalent higher quality sensors; better than each of the individual strain sensors. The core idea behind this work is to use a combination of redundant and disjoint strain sensors to compensate for the time-variant hidden states of a soft-bodied system, to finally obtain the true strain state in a static manner using a learning-based approach. We provide methods to develop these variable sensors and metrics to estimate their dissimilarity and efficacy of each sensor combinations, which can double down as a benchmarking tool for soft robotic sensors. The proposed approach is experimentally validated on a pneumatic actuator with embedded soft strain sensors. Our results show that static data from a combination of nonlinear time variant strain sensors is sufficient to accurately estimate the strain state of a system. © 2016 IEEE.

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