Underwater smart glasses: A visual-tactile fusion hazard detection system

Summary: Marine activities typically face various risk factors such as marine animal attacks or unexpected collisions. In this paper, we develop underwater smart glasses (USGs) based on visual-tactile fusion for underwater hazard detection in real-time, ensuring operational safety. The proposed USG is composed of the vision module by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled optical sensing and the tactile module by triboelectric metamaterials-enabled mechanical sensing. The vision module is obtained based on the underwater target detection algorithm you only look once-underwater hazard (YOLO-UH) developed by the dataset to detect toxic marine organisms in the visual field. The tactile module is designed with the kirigami tribo-materials (KTMs) to sensitively detect and warn of collisions outside the visual field. Through numerical simulations, laboratory tests, and real-world experiments, we validated the performance of both modules. The reported USG with its visual-tactile fusion concept enables near-far all-around hazard detection and reduces the danger for divers working underwater.