A fiber tactile sensor based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer for grasp force control of gripper

Abstract

Aiming to improve the sensitivity of the tactile sensor, we proposed and demonstrated a miniaturized fiber in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) sensor for the measurement of grasping force. The simulation using Rsoft software shows that the sensor has the best performance with the FMF length is 10mm and the core offset is 5um. The mechanical strength of the sensor is improved by using a heat shrink tube at the point of optical fiber fusion splicing. The MZI sensor is embedded at the side of the gripper and the force calibration is performed using the piezoresistive sensor. The experiment shows that the sensitivity of the sensor is about 6.83nm/N in the range of 2.5-10N.