Tailor-made smart glove for robot teleoperation, using printed stretchable sensors

This article introduces a taylor-made smart glove that integrates resistive strain and pressure sensors. A home-made silver based stretchable ink is screen printed over textile to create a strain sensor that estimates finger bending for all fingers. Another piezo resistive ink was synthesized, and screen printed on fingertips, using a specific architecture for pressure sensing that can be used to determine the pressure applied on a fingertip. Using these two techniques, a full glove is printed and is used as a Human Machine Interface (HMI) by recognition of different hand gestures. Unlike previous gloves that are based on placement of external bending sensors, the developed glove in this work can be taylor-made based on user's hand size and the desired resolution of the sensors. Furthermore, the e-textile based gesture recognition architecture is comfortable enough for long-term use. We demonstrate recognition of 10 gestures, that are used to tele-operate different gaits of a walking robot.