Polymer optical fiber tactile sensing enabled by minimal grating structures

Abstract We are developing tactile sensors using fiber Bragg gratings inscribed in perfluorinated graded-index polymer optical fibers (PFGI-POFs). Until now, the effectiveness of tactile sensing has only been demonstrated with PFGI-POF samples containing 500 gratings. In this study, we significantly reduce the number of gratings and show that even a PFGI-POF sample with just one grating can function as a tactile sensor, although with some performance limitations. By comparing samples with 1 and 10 gratings, we observe that while the sensor performance improves with more gratings, both configurations can detect tactile inputs.