The one that wasn’t meant to be
Ever had a great idea but no one saw the same picture you did?
My great idea was to enable sensing in a soft actuator without having to physically build in extra sensors. Usually, if you want to measure force, put a force sensor. If you want to measure bending angles, put a strain sensor. But I don’t want these additional sensors. I wanted to give the actuator a “brain” so that it can infer information from limited sources of data. It’s like how if your nervous system was impaired, you’d still have a pair of eyes to see how much your arm is bent.
So I submitted a conference article in this exact line of thought.
A Fold-Based 3D Printed Self Sensing Pneumatic Actuator (SSPA) for Bidirectional Bending
IROS 2018 [rejected]
Unfortunately, the reviewers felt that the content that I had written was not sufficient for a conference. On hindsight, I thought these comments were very much warranted. Indeed, I was still not particularly good at selling my work then and I had to learn to make a solid argument for the importance of my work. In other words, I should be doing more in-depth literature reviews, especially doing more experiments to present the unseen value of my work and presenting more use cases.
I did not appreciate one reviewer’s comment that said that my concept was not “novel”, without explaining or giving examples of other papers that were similar. He then went on to suggest other areas that I can explore. Areas which quite frankly, are not along the main theme of what I presented i.e. saying magnetic and fiber bragger (it’s fiber bragg by the way, he wrote it that way) having better hysteresis performance and suggesting I try soft robot control. I welcome his suggestion to explore other aspects but it’s a paper that focuses on sensing and not a control paper after all. It can be used in controlling robots for sure but it’s as if he did a cursory glance of my work to have suggested that. And I am obviously not using magnetic and fiber braggs because they are limited in their use cases. Not to mention, they are worse off in terms of their novelty.
I keep receipts of these comments, which is why I can process my thoughts even now. They were definitely useful as motivation, whether to spur me to prove doubters wrong or as legitimately good feedback that I can take with me.
And this directly led to my acceptance in ICRA 2019.
3D Printed Soft Pneumatic Actuators with Intent Sensing for Hand
ICRA 2019
I repackaged my ideas, read more literature, did more experiments and elaborated more on a use case. I felt the clarity of my presentation was much better here, which led to this one getting accepted and the previous one not. The audience is probably different from the first as well, being more catered towards rehabilitative applications.
The biggest takeaway from this experience is the need to believe in the work I do absolutely. If it truly has potential and is impactful, push through the obstacles and enable people to see the value of it. I believed and never wavered.
