At this point, we’re a week into the project. We decided to start with the sensing component and continue on to the actuation once we had that down.

We used force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) for our first milestone, and those worked well. However, in our initial meeting with Rahul, he suggested pursuing creating a mat of sensors. While the FSRs are quite accurate, they are also rather expensive (~$7 each), and we didn’t think it would be scalable to cover an entire mat with these sensors.

Instead, we decided to look into Velostat, a material whose resistance changes based on the forces applied.