A Soft Robot Tactile Finger Using Oxidation-Reduction Graphene–Polyurethane Conductive Sponge

Abstract

Currently, intelligent robotics is supplanting traditional industrial applications. It extends to business, service and care industries, and other fields. Stable robot grasping is a necessary prerequisite for all kinds of complex application scenarios. Herein, we propose a method for preparing an elastic porous material with adjustable conductivity, hardness, and elastic modulus. Based on this, we design a soft robot tactile fingertip that is gentle, highly sensitive, and has an adjustable range. It has excellent sensitivity (~1.089 kpa−1), fast response time (~35 ms), and measures minimum pressures up to 0.02 N and stability over 500 cycles. The baseline capacitance of a sensor of the same size can be increased by a factor of 5–6, and graphene adheres better to polyurethane sponge and has good shock absorption. In addition, we demonstrated the application of the tactile fingertip to a two-finger manipulator to achieve stable grasping. In this paper, we demonstrate the great potential of the soft robot tactile finger in the field of adaptive grasping for intelligent robots.