Soft Tactile Skin with Magnetic Elastomer Composite

We introduce a novel tactile skin that is soft, stretchable, and capable of detection finger touch and swipe motions. This work was recently reported in an article in Advanced Intelligent Systems. The skin is composed of a soft elastomer filled with magnetic microparticles. Sensing is accomplished through a combination of magneto-mechanical coupling of the magnetic elastomer and machine learning techniques for relating the contact pressures to changes in the magnetic sensing signal.

This work was done in collaboration with Oliver Kroemer in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. For more details, check out the full article in Advanced Intelligent Systems.