Development of 3D Printed Structure that Visualizes Bending and Compression Deformations for Soft-bodied Robots

This paper presents 3D printed structure and a measurement algorithm to sense bending and compression/extension deformations for a soft-bodied robot. The proposed method utilizes a 3D printed structure painted with multiple colors to visualize the deformation. Capturing the deformation state with a cheap web camera allows us to simultaneously measure the bending and compression/extension deformations with the proposed algorithm using the image processing library, OpenCV. The experiments with the prototype demonstrate that the method successfully and easily measures the multi-modal deformation distribution. The proposed method can be a powerful tool to measure the complex and rich multi-modal deformations of soft-bodied robots and design the feedback controllers.