Developing Reliable Foam Sensors with Novel Electrodes

This paper presents an ultra-light, highly compressible, resistive sensor based on open-cell polyurethane foam coated with PEDOT:PSS. A novel electrodes configuration is developed to eliminate the unstable contact resistance, providing reliable electrical and mechanical connections for foam-based sensors. Thereby, the proposed sensors have a low resistance of 15 ohm, and can detect small strain variations (<0.1%) with negligible hysteresis (4%). Multiple samples were characterized and analyzed. The resistance only increases 4% after 100 cycles of 70% compression. The proposed foam sensor provides a low-cost, easy-to-implement, robust sensing solution for real-world applications in robotics and wearable systems.