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The safety of human-machine interaction is very important in intelligent manufacturing, and the main purpose of ensuring safety is to enable the robot to receive information about the surrounding environment through proximity sensors, which can achieve good interaction between the machine and humans. In view of the current shortcomings of electronic skins, such as poor flexibility, lack of proximity sensing system, and the immeasurable magnitude of force after contact, we design a composite sensor that can realize proximity and small force haptics in this paper. We use flexible materials such as copper foil, polyimide, polyurethane and a new type of semiconductor material based on super capacitor and design a double-layer pressure-capacitance sensing structure based on the principle of human induced capacitance, variable dielectric constant and variable pitch capacitance. And we use STM32, FDC2214 chip to build a complete information acquisition and processing system.

The ankle joint is an important joint connecting leg and feet. The ankle joint assistance for patients with ankle dyskinesia and some elderly people with degraded functions seems extremely important. Ankle joint assistive devices have shown a significant effect on ankle joint rehabilitation. In this paper, flexible rope transmission technology is introduced into the field of ankle joint assistance. The research in this paper provides a possibility of flexible ankle joint assistance. In terms of structure, the steering gear is used to drive the flexible rope transmission at the front of the foot to assist the ankle dorsiflexion movement, and at the same time, the tension spring is used to assist the plantarflexion movement at the heel of the foot. In the control aspect, the sole pressure sensor and the angle sensor are used to determine position during the gait-cycle, and a prototype of the flexible ankle-assist principle is developed. The prototype is tested for performance and comprehensive application. Experiments show that the prototype can achieve ankle dorsiflexion and plantarflexion motion assistance for the wearing patient, where the dorsiflexion angle can be up to 25°.

In this paper, a novel flexible tactile sensor array based on conductive rubber is presented. Compared with other research results, we use the materials with complete flexibility to fabricate the soft sensors. The sensing prototype includes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the sealing layers and conductive rubber as sensing layer. This proposed tactile sensor can measure the contact pressure under wrapping one curved surface. In our study, we developed a skin-like tactile sensor array from three aspects: design procedures, fabrication techniques and test results via taking one 8×8 sensor array for example, which is a sandwich structure and the sensing material was laminated into a thin encapsulation film with 2mm in thickness. Furthermore, the sensor overcomes the fabrication complexity, chemical unsafety and environmental instability problems to some extent. In the end, the final experimental demonstration verify the feasibility of the sensor array with discrete sensing elements in measuring the tactile force via matlab.