Underwater Smart Glasses: A Visual-tactile Fusion Hazard Detection System

Marine activities typically face various risk factors such as marine animal attacks or unexpected collisions. In this paper, we develop underwater smart glasses (USGs) based on visual-tactile fusion for underwater hazard detection in real-time, ensuring operational safety. The proposed USG is composed of the vision module by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled optical sensing and the tactile module by triboelectric metamaterials-enabled mechanical sensing. The vision module is obtained based on the underwater target detection algorithm (YOLO-UH) developed by the dataset to detect toxic marine organisms in the visual field. The tactile module is designed with the kirigami tribo-materials (KTMs) to sensitively detect and warn of collisions outside the visual field. Through numerical simulations, laboratory tests, and real-world experiments, we validated the performance of both modules. The reported USG with its visual-tactile fusion concept enables near-far all-around hazard detection and reduces the danger for divers working underwater.