Flexible Fiber Inductive Coils for Soft Robots and Wearable Devices
Aby Raj Plamootil Mathai, Thileepan Stalin, Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado
Abstract
Recent advances in additive manufacturing and materials have enabled researchers to design and fabricate tailored soft electronic devices for applications such as soft robots and wearable devices. This study presents a novel fabrication of tailored soft inductive coils by patterning steel conductive fibers using Automated fiber embedding (AFE) techniques. This work highlights the versatility of tailored soft inductive coils for various applications, including flexible sensors, wireless charging units, soft near-field communication (NFC) tags, and communication devices. This simple yet efficient approach to fabricating flexible fiber inductive coils allows for fabricating tailored soft robots, human-machine interfaces, and wearables. The fabricated coils are soft and flexible. Unlike traditional printed circuit boards, they can undergo large elastic deformations with minimum bending radii (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\leq 1mm$</tex-math></inline-formula>).