Sensors operating in extreme environments are currently a focal point of global research. Extreme environmental conditions, such as overload, vibration, corrosion, high pressure, high temperature, and radiation, can affect the performance of sensors to the point of failure. It is noteworthy that, compared to the resistance to overload and vibration achieved through structural design, the application of sensors under high-temperature and radiation extreme conditions poses a greater challenge. Silicon carbide (SiC) material, due to its excellent physical and chemical properties, such as a large band gap and high atomic critical displacement energy, demonstrates outstanding potential for application in high-temperature and radiation extreme environments. This review presents the current status and research progress of SiC sensors in high-temperature and radiation extreme environments. Finally, given the limited research on the radiation resistance of SiC sensors, it identifies several challenges and research deficiencies in the application of SiC sensors under radiation extreme environments and discusses the future development direction of SiC-based substrate sensors.

Real-time detection of contact states, such as stick-slip interaction between a robot and an object on its end effector, is crucial for the robot to grasp and manipulate the object steadily. This paper presents a novel tactile sensor based on electromagnetic induction and its application on stick-slip interaction. An equivalent cantilever-beam model of the tactile sensor was built and capable of constructing the relationship between the sensor output and the friction applied on the sensor. With the tactile sensor, a new method to detect stick-slip interaction on the contact surface between the object and the sensor is proposed based on the characteristics of friction change. Furthermore, a prototype was developed for a typical application, stable wafer transferring on a wafer transfer robot, by considering the spatial magnetic field distribution and the sensor size according to the requirements of wafer transfer. The experimental results validate the sensing mechanism of the tactile sensor and verify its feasibility of detecting stick-slip on the contact surface between the wafer and the sensor. The sensing mechanism also provides a new approach to detect the contact state on the soft-rigid surface in other robot-environment interaction systems.

A quartz resonant pressure sensor is proposed for high-precision measurement of ultra-high pressure. The resonant unit realizes a push–pull differential layout, which restrains the common-mode interference factor, and the resonator is only subject to axial force. The pressure conversion unit is made in an integrated manner, avoiding output drift problems caused by residual stress and small gaps during assembly, welding, and other processes in sensor preparation. Theoretical and simulation analysis was conducted on the overall design scheme of the sensor in this paper, verifying the feasibility. Sensor prototypes were created and performance experiments were conducted. The experimental results show that the sensitivity of the ultra-high pressure sensor is 46.32 Hz/MPa at room temperature within the pressure range of 120 MPa, and the comprehensive accuracy is 0.0266%. The comprehensive accuracy of the sensor is better than 0.0288% FS in the full temperature range environment. This proves that the sensor scheme is suitable for high-precision and high-stability detection of ultra-high pressure, providing new solutions in special pressure measurement fields such as deep-sea and oil exploration.

This paper presents a flexible tactile sensor with a compact structure based on a piezoresistive thin film and an elastomer for detecting three-dimensional (3D) force. The film contains four independent sensing cells, which were made using a type of piezoresistive ink and a specific pectinate conductive circuit pattern based on the flexible substrate to decrease the coupling effect. The elastomer with a spherical surface is bonded to the surface of the film and transfers the force to the sensing array. A model of 3D force detection based on the proposed sensor was established, and a prototype was designed and developed. Static and dynamic experiments were carried out, and the results show that the range of the prototype is 0–50 N in the z-axis and 0–6 N in the x-axis and y-axis, which with good static and dynamic performance, especially a low coupling effect, validates the mechanism of the proposed sensor and indicates that it has good potential application in robotic grasping.

Contact model of the soft-solid interactions plays an important role for robotic and mechatronic systems design. We present a new model of the soft-solid contact that integrates the LuGre dynamic friction model with the beam network model. The LuGre dynamic friction model uses the bristle deformation to capture the friction characteristics and dynamics while the beam network model represents the elastic contact interactions. The new model is applied to a fingertip-like stick-slip interaction application. We present the model prediction and validation results with the experiments. The comparison results demonstrate the effectiveness of the modeling development.

A novel velocity sensor based on electromagnetic induction was proposed in this paper. It was composed of four small inductor chips with circular symmetrical distribution on the bottom of a printed circuit board (PCB) and an elastic body with a permanent magnet embedded into on the top of the PCB. The output voltage of each inductor chip will change when an object moves on the top of sensor and drives the permanent to follow with a specific speed. The principle of velocity measurement was derived and simulation was carried out to determine size of the magnet and size of the whole sensor. Then, a prototype was developed and velocity experiments were executed to evaluate properties of the prototype. The result shows that the prototype was capable of following the velocity curve of a motion platform and measuring the velocity vector of the platform with nonlinear errors of 8.1% and 11.9% along its x-axis and y-axis respectively when the speed was from 1mm/s to 9mm/s.