Compact LED-Based Displacement Sensing for Robot Fingers

In this paper, we introduce a sensor designed for integration in robot fingers, where it can provide information on the displacements induced by external contact. Our sensor uses LEDs to sense the displacement between two plates connected by a transparent elastomer; when a force is applied to the finger, the elastomer displaces and the LED signals change. We show that using LEDs as both light emitters an receivers in this context provides high sensitivity, allowing such an emitter and receiver pairs to detect very small displacements. We characterize the standalone performance of the sensor by testing the ability of a supervised learning model to predict complete force and torque data from its raw signals, and obtain a mean error between 0.05 and 0.07 N across the three directions of force applied to the finger. Our method allows for finger-size packaging with no amplification electronics, low cost manufacturing, easy integration into a complete hand, and high overload shear forces and bending torques, suggesting future applicability to complete manipulation tasks.