Proprioceptive Touch of a Soft Actuator Containing an Embedded Intrinsically Soft Sensor using Kinesthetic Feedback

This paper presents an approach to a kinesthetic sense of touch for a finger-like soft robotic actuator innervated with a soft fluidic resistive sensor which is sensitive to bending. The approach is based on the sensor resistance reference tracking feedback controller and uses the reference tracking error as a measure of stress resulting from the contact between the actuator and an object. With the proposed approach, we accomplish tasks of detecting a touch between the actuator and an object, keeping the actuator in the compliant touch with the object and creating a map that visualizes objects in the operating space without any visual information. Our results demonstrate that the tracking error signal contains robust information regarding the contact interaction between the actuator and its environment.