Optical lace gives light touch to soft robots

The synthetic material, which is said to create a linked sensory network similar to a biological nervous system, was developed by Ph.D. student Patricia Xu through the Organics Robotics Lab at Cornell University. A paper describing the work is published in Science Robotics.

"We want to have a way to measure stresses and strains for highly deformable objects, and we want to do it using the hardware itself, not vision," said lab director Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the paper's senior author. "A good way to think about it is from a biological perspective. A blind person can still feel because they have sensors in their fingers that deform when their finger deforms. Robots don't have that right now."

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Shepherd's lab previously created sensory foams that used optical fibres to detect such deformations. For the optical lace project, Xu used a flexible, porous lattice structure manufactured from 3D-printed polyurethane. According to Cornell, she threaded its core with stretchable optical fibres containing more than a dozen mechanosensors and then attached an LED light to illuminate the fibre.