Soft Tactile Coil-Based Sensor for Misalignment Detection of Adhesive Fibrillary Gripping Systems

Micropatterned dry adhesive systems are a promising alternative to conventional handling solutions. However, the use of these gripping systems still requires precise manual adjustment of the gripping parameters. To address this limitation, a coil‐based sensor is designed to enable automatic detection of the attachment process. The sensor consists of three sensing, one transmitting coil, a conductive film, and a compliant layer. The components are optimized to achieve reproducible, precise measurements, and minimize hysteresis effects of the components. A mathematical concept to calculate the geometrical relations between the gripping object and the gripper is established based on triangulation. The functionality of the sensor system is demonstrated in contact experiments with a glass substrate under different tilt angles, and an accuracy of 0.042 degree is achieved. The sensor system not only allows precise detection of the misalignment angle but also fast estimation of the qualitative direction of misalignment with minimal compression. This is interesting for scaling the sensor system to industrial pick‐and‐place applications as it promises to speed up the handling times and reliability of the fibrillary adhesives. In the future, the system needs to be extended to capture more complex objects and properties to be applicable to more handling problems.