Monitoring Soft Shape Surface Deformation via Optical Images for the Distinction of Contact State

• Published in: Advanced intelligent systems Vol. 6; no. 3
• Main Authors: Zou, Zhibin, Li, Zilan, Zhou, Yuanzhi, Zhou, Guoyuan, Xu, Weiliang, Wu, Wenfeng, Zhang, Huiming, Chen, Zefeng, Dai, Zhaohe, Li, Xinming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Weinheim John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.03.2024; Wiley
• Subjects: CMOS; Contact angle; contact states; Deformation effects; Elastomers; Flexible components; Formability; Incident light; Interactive systems; Irradiance; Light; Monitoring; Optical communication; optical images; soft touch; surface deformation
• ISSN: 2640-4567; 2640-4567
• DOI: 10.1002/aisy.202300535

The deformability of elastomer surfaces offers the opportunity to capture multimodal physical information, which opens up possibilities for applications in intelligent interactive systems and flexible electronics. Accurately identifying the surface deformation of elastomers has been a key issue for understanding the contact state in a soft touch. However, effective monitoring of the deformed surface topography during soft‐touch processes is difficult due to the complexity of interfacial deformation. Herein, the optical detection method based on an ideal diffuse reflection model is proposed to monitor the deformation of the elastomer, enabling the acquisition of a spatially continuous deformation of the surface in a soft touch. This optical system with the parallel incident light can distinguish the elastomers’ surface deformation field by constructing the correlation between the reflected light irradiance and the surface deformation angle. This method allows for the perception of the contact area. Through the deep learning method, the recognition rate can reach more than 84.24% when there are slight differences in the contact of objects with different geometric shapes. The design offers valuable insights for contact state detection tasks and facilitates soft‐touch sensing functions through the high precision of optical signal acquisition. Soft elastomer interfaces present an opportunity for capturing multimodal physical information. However, effectively characterizing the surface morphology proves difficult in the soft‐touch process. An optical sensing method based on the ideal diffuse reflection model is proposed, which can realize the large information and high‐precision perception of soft touch, and thus realize the monitoring of contact state.