Diana E Young

US Patent:

20180143091, May 24, 2018

Filed:

Nov 27, 2017

Appl. No.:

15/823030

Inventors:

- Cambridge MA, US
Carmel S. Majidi - Pittsburgh PA, US
Bor-rong Chen - Medford MA, US
Leia Stirling - Stoneham MA, US
Conor James Walsh - Dublin, IE
Radhika Nagpal - Cambridge MA, US
Diana Young - Boston MA, US
Yigit Menguc - Somerville MA, US

Assignee:

President and Fellows of Harvard College - Cambridge MA

International Classification:

G01L 1/22
A43B 23/02
A61B 5/103
B25J 13/08
A61B 5/11
A43B 13/20
G06F 3/01
A61F 2/10
A61B 5/00

Abstract:

An elastic strain sensor can be incorporated into an artificial skin that can sense flexing by the underlying support structure of the skin to detect and track motion of the support structure. The unidirectional elastic strain sensor can be formed by filling two or more channels in an elastic substrate material with a conductive liquid. At the ends of the channels, a loop port connects the channels to form a serpentine channel. The channels extend along the direction of strain and the loop portions have sufficiently large cross-sectional area in the direction transverse to the direction of strain that the sensor is unidirectional. The resistance is measured at the ends of the serpentine channel and can be used to determine the strain on the sensor. Additional channels can be added to increase the sensitivity of the sensor. The sensors can be stacked on top of each other to increase the sensitivity of the sensor. In other embodiments, two sensors oriented in different directions can be stacked on top of each other and bonded together to form a bidirectional sensor. A third sensor formed by in the shape of a spiral or concentric rings can be stacked on top and used to sense contact or pressure, forming a three dimensional sensor. The three dimensional sensor can be incorporated into an artificial skin to provide advanced sensing.