Deformation Capture via Self-Sensing Capacitive Arrays

We propose a novel hardware and software pipeline to fabricate flexible wearable sensors and use them to capture deformations without line of sight. Our first contribution is a low-cost fabrication pipeline to embed conductive layers with complex geometries into silicone compounds. Overlapping conductive areas from separate layers form local capacitors which measure dense area changes. Contrary to existing fabrication methods, the proposed technique only requires hardware that is readily available in modern fablabs. While area measurements alone are not enough to reconstruct the full 3D deformation of a surface, they become sufficient when paired with a data-driven prior. A novel semi-automatic tracking algorithm, based on an elastic surface geometry, allows to capture ground-truth data with an optical mocap system, even under heavy occlusions or partially unobservable markers. The resulting dataset is used to train a regressor based on deep neural networks, directly mapping the area readings to global positions of surface vertices. We demonstrate the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed hardware and software in a series of controlled experiments, and design a prototype of a wearable wrist/elbow sensor, which does not require line-of-sight and can be worn below regular clothing.