Soft Polymer Optical Fiber Sensors for Intelligent Recognition of Elastomer Deformations and Wearable Applications

In recent years, soft robotic sensors have rapidly advanced to endow robots with the ability to interact with the external environment. Here, we propose a polymer optical fiber (POF) sensor with sensitive and stable detection performance for strain, bending, twisting, and pressing. Thus, we can map the real-time output light intensity of POF sensors to the spatial morphology of the elastomer. By leveraging the intrinsic correlations of neighboring sensors and machine learning algorithms, we realize the spatially resolved detection of the pressing and multi-dimensional deformation of elastomers. Specifically, the developed intelligent sensing system can effectively recognize the two-dimensional indentation position with a prediction accuracy as large as ~99.17%. The average prediction accuracy of combined strain and twist is ~98.4% using the random forest algorithm. In addition, we demonstrate an integrated intelligent glove for the recognition of hand gestures with a high recognition accuracy of 99.38%. Our work holds promise for applications in soft robots for interactive tasks in complex environments, providing robots with multidimensional proprioceptive perception. And it also can be applied in smart wearable sensing, human prosthetics, and human–machine interaction interfaces.