Stretchable Human Machine Interface Based on Smart Glove Embedded With PDMS-CB Strain Sensors

Human machine interface (HMI) has recently received more and more attentions as it would provide a media for human to interact with outside environments to promote people's lifestyles. Flexible and stretchable electronics have been widely laminated onto the surface of human skin, gloves, or other soft objects for collecting the deformation signal. The paper proposes an HMI based on stretchable smart glove embedded with soft piezoresistive strain sensors for signal classification and controlling the motion of robot fingers. The stretchable polydimethylsiloxane-carbon black (PDMS-CB) strain sensors satisfy larger deformation (>30%) which is validated by FEM simulation and experiments. The morphology of the soft and complex objects is detected by the smart glove when fingers touch the objects. Feature signals are extracted with the different finger gestures by the soft strain sensors laminated onto different fingers. Human robot interaction (HRI) algorithm is proposed to analyze and recognize the finger gestures for controlling the motion of the robot fingers. Experiments demonstrate that the motion of robot finger is successfully controlled remotely by the smart glove embedded with PDMS-CB strain sensors. Exploring HRI capabilities into the stretchable smart glove represents promising research directions in the future.