Tactile Pressure Sensor Based on Flexible Polymer Optical Waveguides Fabricated by the Mosquito Method

Abstract

In this paper, a polymer-based optical waveguide sensor is created to address several issues in optical fiber-based sensors. The unique feature of our optical waveguide is its 3-D core arranged design fabricated using the Mosquito method to which poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS) is applied as the cladding for a flexible tactile sensor. The core monomer is dispensed into the PDMS monomer to have a 3D lattice structure. We demonstrate that the fabricated waveguide sensors exhibit a high repeatability of the pressure sensing. We find that the measurement range is from 0 MPa to 0.164 MPa when an organic inorganic hybrid resin, NP-C01-KO is used as the main core material. By examining the effect of the numerical aperture and the core size on the sensitivity, we confirm that bending loss could cause the output power variation when a load is applied to the sensor.