Indirect sensing in soft robots using observers/filters

A note from Melanie Ooi: Soft robotics is a very new and interesting research area with many applications, and sensing in soft robots remains a big challenge. Our guest columnists from Monash University Malaysia, Dr. Chee Pin Tan and Dr. Surya Nurzaman, have expertise in state estimation and soft robotics, respectively. Together with their graduate research students, they share with us how state estimation can be used for indirect sensing in soft robots, thus contributing a solution to this long-standing challenge of enabling sensing in soft robots.