Optical fiber curvature sensor based on polydimethylsiloxane encapsulated Mach-Zehnder interferometer

There are more and more people-centered devices around the world, so people's attention to flexible robots is gradually increasing, this drives the development of flexible sensors. By understanding the background of fiber elastic sensor, an all-optical fiber curvature sensor is proposed, which is composed of a polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS) elastic material encapsulated all-optical fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer(MZI), which is worn to different fingers can produce different wavelength drift phenomenon. It is small in volume, light in weight, without electromagnetic interference, high sensitivity, and fast response speed. Due to this characteristic of the bending sensor, it can be applied to robotic hands, flexible robots and motion monitoring.