Super-Stretchable Polymer Optical Fibers for Robot Finger Posture and Pressure Recognition

Soft and stretchable optical fibers have wide applications ranging from health monitoring, human-machine interfaces, biomedical implants to intelligent robots tactile sensing. While the scalable manufacture of high-performance stretchable optical fibers remains a challenge, which limits their developments and practical applications. Here, we develop a universal platform to achieve the scalable manufacture of long and uniform stretchable optical fibers with large elastic deformation (up to 1190%) and excellent flexible sensing performance. Through in-depth study of rheological properties of the elastomer materials, various elastomers with different refractive index can be integrated into a single fiber to obtain core-clad structured stretchable optical waveguides. The application of the fabricated super-stretchable polymer optical fibers for robot finger posture and pressure recognition are demonstrated. This work not only pave new avenues for the scalable manufacture of stretchable optical fibers, but also demonstrating their practical applications in flexible sensing fields such as motion monitoring, robotic tactile sensing.