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Project

Fits Like a Flex-Glove: Automatic Design of Personalized FPCB-Based Tactile Sensing Gloves

Devin Murphy

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Resistive tactile sensing gloves have captured the interest of researchers spanning diverse domains, such as robotics, healthcare, and human-computer interaction. However, existing fabrication methods often require labor-intensive assembly or costly equipment, limiting accessibility. Leveraging flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) technology, we present an automated pipeline for generating resistive tactile sensing glove design files solely from a simple hand photo on legal-size paper, which can be readily supplied to commercial board houses for manufacturing. Our method enables cost-effective, accessible production at under $130 per glove with sensor assembly times under 15 minutes. Sensor performance was characterized under varying pressure loads, and a preliminary user evaluation showcases four unique automatically manufactured designs, evaluated for their reliability and comfort.

 We envision this work helping to democratize human-hand centric touch sensing, making it possible to collect bimanual manipulation data at scale and deepening our understanding of human touch for applications such as human-robot task transfer, physically realistic object interaction in virtual reality, and cross-modal translation (i.e, from vision to touch).