MIT's soft shape-sensing sheet digitally tracks its own bends and twists
Shape-sensing sheet digitally tracks its own movement as it bends and twists
MIT engineers have created a flexible sheet that reconstructs its own 3D shape in real time as it bends and twists. Soft optical fibers zig-zag through the stretchable material; when the sheet deforms, the light patterns inside the fibers change, and an algorithm converts those changes into a digital twin. The design is robust to damage—even with some fibers cut, the remaining ones still track the overall shape. It could enable wearable controllers for games or robots, and physical therapy tools that precisely record a patient's range of motion.
We use a metric that describes the distance between the actual surface and the reconstructed surface, and from that, we found our error was less than 0.4 centimeters. Existing designs, which are based on rigid sensors, have errors of around 1 to 2 centimeters.