The need for compliant and proprioceptive actuators has grown more evident in pursuing more adaptable and versatile robotic systems. Hydraulically Amplified Self-Healing Electrostatic (HASEL) actuators offer distinctive advantages with their inherent softness and flexibility, making them promising candidates for various robotic tasks, including delicate interactions with humans and animals, biomimetic locomotion, prosthetics, and exoskeletons. This has resulted in a growing interest in the capacitive self-sensing capabilities of HASEL actuators to create miniature displacement estimation circuitry that does not require external sensors. However, achieving HASEL self-sensing for actuation frequencies above 1 Hz and with miniature high-voltage power supplies has remained limited. In this paper, we introduce the F-HASEL actuator, which adds an additional electrode pair used exclusively for capacitive sensing to a Peano-HASEL actuator. We demonstrate displacement estimation of the F-HASEL during high-frequency actuation up to 20 Hz and during external loading using miniaturized circuitry comprised of low-cost off-the-shelf components and a miniature high-voltage power supply. Finally, we propose a circuitry to estimate the displacement of multiple F-HASELs and demonstrate it in a wearable application to track joint rotations of a virtual reality user in real-time.

翻译：为构建更具适应性和多功能性的机器人系统，对顺应性及本体感知执行器的需求日益凸显。液压放大自修复静电（HASEL）执行器凭借其固有的柔顺性与灵活性，在精细人机交互、仿生运动、假肢及外骨骼等机器人任务中展现出独特优势。现有研究聚焦于开发基于HASEL执行器电容自感知功能的微型位移估计电路，以替代传统外部传感器。然而，在1Hz以上驱动频率下实现微型高压电源供电的HASEL自感知技术仍然受限。本文提出F-HASEL执行器，在Peano-HASEL执行器中增设专用电容传感电极对。通过采用低成本商用元件构建的微型电路与微型高压电源，我们实现了F-HASEL在20Hz高频驱动及外部载荷工况下的位移估计。最后，提出适用于多F-HASEL位移估计的电路方案，并在可穿戴应用中实时追踪虚拟现实用户的关节旋转角度。