Toward Gripper-Integrated Active Electrosense for Pre-Contact Sensing in Underwater Soft Grippers
For underwater soft grippers operating in low-visibility conditions, this provides a lightweight proximity-like cue to guide approach and grasping when vision fails.
This work explores active electrosense as a pre-contact sensing modality for underwater soft grippers, demonstrating object-dependent voltage changes in simulation and tank experiments with a conductive sphere. Results show detectability varies with excitation voltage (5-20 V) and frequency (1 mHz-1 kHz), motivating further investigation.
Underwater manipulation often occurs under degraded visibility due to turbidity, glare, and gripper occlusion, limiting the reliability of vision-based perception during approach and grasping. In such settings, soft grippers are well suited for compliant interaction, but they typically lack an onboard pre-contact cue that can guide approach and closure when vision is unreliable. This extended abstract explores active electrosense as a lightweight sensing modality that can provide a proximity-like signal prior to contact by measuring perturbations of an applied electric field in conductive media. We instrument an octopus-inspired gripper with a discrete electrode layout and record multi-channel sensing voltages using off-the-shelf hardware. Simulation and tank experiments with a suspended conductive sphere show structured, object-dependent changes in the multi-electrode voltage readout relative to empty-water baselines, with detectability varying across excitation of 5 to 20 V and frequencies from 1 mHz to 1 kHz. These findings motivate systematic investigation of gripper-integrated electrosense as a complementary pre-contact cue for underwater soft manipulation.