Nerve-like 'optical lace' gives robots a human touch

The stretchable optical lace material was developed by Ph.D. student Patricia Xu through the Organics Robotics Lab at Cornell University. "We want to have a way to measure stresses and strains for highly deformable objects, and we want to do it using the hardware itself, not vision," said lab director Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the paper's senior author. "A good way to think about it is from a biological perspective. A blind person can still feel because they have sensors in their fingers that deform when their finger deforms. Robots don't have that right now." Shepherd's lab previously created sensory foams that used optical fibers to detect such deformations.