High-Frequency Capacitive Sensing for Electrohydraulic Soft Actuators

The need for compliant and proprioceptive actuators has grown more evident in pursuing more adaptable and versatile robotic systems. Hydraulically Amplified Self-Healing Electrostatic (HASEL) actuators offer distinctive advantages with their inherent softness and flexibility, making them promising candidates for various robotic tasks, including delicate interactions with humans and animals, biomimetic locomotion, prosthetics, and exoskeletons. This has resulted in a growing interest in the capacitive self-sensing capabilities of HASEL actuators to create miniature displacement estimation circuitry that does not require external sensors. However, achieving HASEL self-sensing for actuation frequencies above 1 Hz and with miniature high-voltage power supplies has remained limited. In this paper, we introduce the F-HASEL actuator, which adds an additional electrode pair used exclusively for capacitive sensing to a Peano-HASEL actuator. We demonstrate displacement estimation of the F-HASEL during high-frequency actuation up to 20 Hz and during external loading using miniaturized circuitry comprised of low-cost off-the-shelf components and a miniature high-voltage power supply. Finally, we propose circuitry to estimate the displacement of multiple F-HASELs and demonstrate it in a wearable application to track joint rotations of a virtual reality user in real-time.