MIT develops wearable silicone sensor that tracks its 3D shape via optical fibers

Engineers at MIT have developed a soft, wearable silicone sheet that can track its own 3D shape using embedded optical fibers. The research, published in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems, was reported by Tom's Hardware.

The sheet contains 14 waveguides, each 160 mm long, arranged in two zig-zagged layers of seven within a 16 x 16 x 0.5 cm silicone sheet. Each waveguide uses a flexible rubber core with black-dyed cladding, and one side is roughened to enable bi-directional bending detection.

In lab tests, the sheet reconstructed shapes with root-mean-square errors of 0.37, 0.28 and 0.45 cm across three 3D-printed molds. Simulations stayed under 0.3 cm error with up to three of the 14 waveguides disabled, rising to about 1 cm or more when five were disabled.

Reconstruction runs in MATLAB at about three times per second. Qifan Yu, a mechanical engineering graduate student on the team, and Kaitlyn Becker, an MIT assistant professor of mechanical engineering and co-author, were among the researchers involved.

The team said the technology could be used for controlling games, virtual reality and physical therapy.