Development of soft and compliant multimodal deformation sensors

In this paper, a novel but simple deformation sensor concept is introduced together with the required electronics design to run it. The evaluated prototype sensors showed linear response to both elongation and bending for many hours of repetitive deformations, while still remaining simple and low cost. Thanks to the Wheatstone bridge setup used to measure the bending angle, and the capacitance change used to measure the elongation, these signals are independent of each other. Consequently, the sensors can distinguish between the different mechanical stimuli and register them simultaneously. Combining such sensors in a compliant network with data acquisition units would enable the dynamic registration of the three-dimensional shape of whatever is wrapped in the network, including moving bodies.