A hierarchically patterned, bioinspired e-skin able to detect the direction of applied pressure for robotics

By Marc Negre, Mikael Jorda, O. Vardoulis, Alex Chortos, Oussama Khatib, Zhenan Bao. Science Robotics, 2018

816 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An e-skin that uses multiple levels of biologically inspired patterning is capable of discriminating both normal and tangential forces. Tactile sensing is required for the dexterous manipulation of objects in robotic applications. In particular, the ability to measure and distinguish in real time normal and shear forces is crucial for slip detection and interaction with fragile objects. Here, we report a biomimetic soft electronic skin (e-skin) that is composed of an array of capacitors and capable of measuring and discriminating in real time both normal and tangential forces. It is enabled by a three-dimensional structure that mimics the interlocked dermis-epidermis interface in human skin. Moreover, pyramid microstructures arranged along nature-inspired phyllotaxis spirals resulted in an e-skin with increased sensitivity, minimal hysteresis, excellent cycling stability, and response time in the millisecond range. The e-skin provided sensing feedback for controlling a robot arm in various tasks, illustrating its potential application in robotics with tactile feedback.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ddb3bc8533d87d6e24d0b6ac4f062544c6ee383

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Xinge Guo
2. Chengkuo Lee
3. Long Liu
4. Tianyiyi He
5. Feng Wen
6. Qiongfeng Shi
7. Bowei Dong
8. Jianxiong Zhu

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Chengkuo Lee
2. Xinge Guo
3. Long Liu
4. Tianyiyi He
5. Feng Wen
6. Qiongfeng Shi
7. Jianxiong Zhu
8. Bowei Dong

Citations in the corpus

• Soft magnetic skin for super-resolution tactile sensing with force self-decoupling (2021, background): “Recent progress in materials science has enabled shear force detection through a complicated electrode structure ( 9 , 10 , 15 – 17 ), and such materials include carbon nanotubes ( 9 , 15 – 17 ), copper/tin-coated textile ( 10 ), graphene oxide ( 15 ), buckypaper ( 16 ), and so on.”
• Progress in TENG technology—A journey from energy harvesting to nanoenergy and nanosystem (2020, background): “Beyond the energy harvesting and the self-powered sensing by individual TENG, NENS in the concept of integrated systems are rapidly emerging in various research areas for their promising future in diversified applications, that is, blue energy, wearable electronics/HMI, neural interface/implanted de”