• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2021

Soft robotics has attracted a huge amount of interest in the recent decade or so, be it either actuators or sensors. Recently, a soft optical waveguide sensor has proven its effectiveness for various sensing applications such as strain, force, and bending measurements. The operation principle of the waveguide is simple, but the present technology is far too much complex to manufacture the waveguide. The waveguide fails to attract various practical applications in comparison to other types of sensors despite its superior safety and ease working principle. This study pursues to develop the soft sensors based on the optical phenomena so that the waveguide can be easily manufactured and its design can be conducted. Several physical properties of the waveguide are confirmed through the repetitive experiments in the aspects of strain, force, and bending of the waveguide. Finally, the waveguide sensor is embedded inside the actuator to verify the effectiveness of the proposed waveguide as well as to extend the application fields of the waveguide sensor.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.491-499
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• 2014

It is important to accurately measure and control the relative humidity of humidified gas entering a PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cell stack because the level of humidification strongly affects the performance and durability of the stack. Humidity measurement devices can be used to directly measure the relative humidity, but they cost much to be equipped and occupy spaces in a fuel cell system. We present soft sensors for predicting the relative humidity without actual humidity measuring devices. By combining FIR (finite impulse response) model with PLS (partial least square) and SVM (support vector machine) regression models, DPLS (dynamic PLS) and DSVM (dynamic SVM) soft sensors were developed to correctly estimate the relative humidity of humidified gases exiting a planar-type membrane humidifier. The DSVM soft sensor showed a better prediction performance than the DPLS one because it is able to capture nonlinear correlations between the relative humidity and the input data of the soft sensors. Without actual humidity sensors, the soft sensors presented in this work can be used to monitor and control the humidity in operation of PEM fuel cell systems.

• Journal of Powder Materials
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.509-517
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• 2021

Smart materials capable of changing their characteristics in response to stimuli such as light, heat, pH, and electric and magnetic fields are promising for application to flexible electronics, soft robotics, and biomedicine. Compared with conventional rigid materials, these materials are typically composed of soft materials that improve the biocompatibility and allow for large and dynamic deformations in response to external environmental stimuli. Among them, smart magnetic materials are attracting immense attention owing to their fast response, remote actuation, and wide penetration range under various conditions. In this review, we report the material design and fabrication of smart magnetic materials. Furthermore, we focus on recent advances in their typical applications, namely, soft magnetic actuators, sensors for self-assembly, object manipulation, shape transformation, multimodal robot actuation, and tactile sensing.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2022

Soft sensors are used to anticipate complicated model parameters using data from classifiers that are comparatively easy to gather. The goal of this study is to use artificial intelligence techniques to design and build soft sensors. The combination of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) is used to create a unique soft sensor. LSTM is developed to tackle linear model with strong nonlinearity and unpredictability of manufacturing applications in the learning approach. GWO is used to accomplish input optimization technique for LSTM in order to reduce the model's inappropriate complication. The newly designed soft sensor originally brought LSTM's superior dynamic modeling with GWO's exact variable selection. The performance of our proposal is demonstrated using simulations on real-world datasets.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.79-87
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a method to obtain a linear characteristic using soft computing for systems which have array sensors of nonlinear characteristics. Also a procedure utilizing the pattern information of array sensors without additional sensors is proposed to reduce disturbance effects. For a typical example, even a single CdS cell for CdS array has nonlinear characteristics. Overall linear characteristic for CdS array is obtained using fuzzy logic for each cell and overlapped portion. In addition, further improvement for linearization is obtained applying genetic algorithms for the parameters of membership functions. Also the effect of disturbing external light changes to the CdS array can be reduced without using any additional sensors for calibration. The proposed method based on fuzzy logic shows improvements for position measurements and disturbance reduction to external light changes due to the fuzziness of the shadow boundary as well as the inherent nonlinearity of the CdS array. This improvement is shown by applying the proposed method to the ball position measurements of a magnetic levitation system.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.7-11
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• 2024

Soft-pressure sensors have numerous applications in soft robotics, biomedical devices, and wearable smart devices. Herein, we present a highly sensitive electronic skin device with an isotropic wrinkled pressure sensor. A conductive ink for soft pressure sensors is produced by a solution process using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), poly 3-hexylthiophene (P3HT), carbon black, and chloroform as the solvents. P3HT provides high reproducibility and conductivity by improving the ink dispersibility. The conductivity of the ink is optimized by adjusting the composition of the carbon black and PDMS. Soft lithography is used to fabricate a conductive elastic structure with an isotropic wrinkled structure. Two conductive elastic structures with an isotropic wrinkle structure is stacked to develop a pressure sensor, and it is confirmed that the isotropic wrinkle structure is more sensitive to pressure than when two elastic structures with an anisotropic wrinkle structure are overlapped. Specifically, the pressure sensor fabricated with an isotropic wrinkled structure can detect extremely low pressures (1.25 Pa). Additionally, the sensor has a high sensitivity of 15.547 kpa^-1 from 1.25 to 2500 Pa and a linear sensitivity of 5.15 kPa^-1 from 2500 Pa to 25 kPa.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.178-183
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• 2016

Semiconductor gas sensors based on metal oxide are widely used in a number of applications, from health and safety to energy efficiency and emission control. Nanomaterials including nanowires, nanorods, and nanoparticles have dominated the research focus in this field owing to their large number of surface sites that facilitate surface reactions. Recently, metal oxide hollow structures using soft templates have been developed owing to their high sensing properties with large-area uniformity. Here, we provide a brief overview of metal oxide hollow structures and their gas-sensing properties from the aspects of template size, morphology, and additives. In addition, a gas-sensing mechanism and perspectives are presented.

• Composites Research
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.50-54
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• 2020

Soft robotics and wearable devices require large motions and flexibility. In this regard, there is a demand for developing stretchable strain sensors which can be attached to the soft robots and wearable devices. In this work, we fabricated stretchable and electrically conductive composite fibers by combining polyurethane (PU) and silver nanoflowers (AgNFs). The PU/AgNF composite fibers showed the change of the resistance as a function of the applied strain, demonstrating the potential for stretchable strain sensors in soft robotics and wearable devices. The mechanical and electrical characteristics of the composite fibers were measured and analyzed to use the composite fibers for stretchable strain sensors.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.77 no.2
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• pp.167-177
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• 2021

Due to various benefits such as unlimited degrees of freedom, environment adaptability, and safety for humans, engineers have used soft materials with hyperelastic behavior in various industrial, medical, rescue, and other sectors. One of the applications of these materials in the fabrication of bending soft actuators (SA) is that they have eliminated many problems in the actuators such as production cost, mechanical complexity, and design algorithm. However, SA has complexities, such as predicting and monitoring behavior despite the many benefits. The first part of this paper deals with the prediction of SA behavior through mathematical models such as Ogden and Darijani, and its comparison with the results of experiments. At first, by examining different geometric models, the cubic structure was selected as the optimal structure in the investigated models. This geometrical structure at the same pressure showed the most significant bending in the simulation. The simulation results were then compared with experimental, and the final gripper model was designed and manufactured using a 3D printer with silicone rubber as for the polymer part. This geometrical structure is capable of bending up to a 90-degree angle at 70 kPa in less than 2 seconds. The second section is dedicated to monitoring the bending behavior created by the strain sensors with different sensitivity and stretchability. In the fabrication of the sensors, silicon is used as a soft material with hyperelastic behavior and carbon fiber as a conductive material in the soft material substrate. The SA designed in this paper is capable of deforming up to 1000 cycles without changing its characteristics and capable of moving objects weigh up to 1200 g. This SA has the capability of being used in soft robots and artificial hand making for high-speed objects harvesting.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.40 no.9
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• pp.815-820
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• 2016

An elastic polymer (e.g., PDMS) blended with EFG particles is a promising conductive composite for fabricating soft sensors that can detect an object's deformation up to or more than 50%. Here, we develop large-strain, sprayable soft sensors using a mixture of PDMS and EFG particles, which are used as a host elastomer and electrically conductive particles, respectively. A solution for a conductive composite mixture is prepared by the microwave-assisted graphite exfoliation, followed by ultrasonication-induced fragmentation of the exfoliated graphite and ultrasonic blending of PDMS and EFG. Using the prepared solutions for composite and pure PDMS, 1-, 2-, and 3-axis soft sensors are fabricated by airbrush stencil technique where composite mixture and pure PDMS are materials for sensing and insulating layers, respectively. We characterize the soft strain sensors after investigating the effect of PDMS/EFG wt% on mechanical compliance and electrical conductance of the conductive composite.