Additively Fabricated Electronic Skin with High Performance in Dynamic Sensing as Human Skin

Abstract

Electronic skin has shown great application value in health monitoring, robotic tactile perception, and bionic prostheses. Liquid metal offers great potential for electronic skins. In this work, a 9-unit (3 × 3) gallium-based liquid metal electronic skin was fabricated by using an inner rinsing template method. The single-circuit unit is around 1 cm2, and it can achieve linear sensing in the range of 100–20000 Pa with a 20 Pa pressure resolution. Its frequency detection range is 1–50 Hz. The modular electronic skin can sense up to 9 independent touch points simultaneously and spontaneously. In further dynamic detection experiments, the electronic skin successfully identified sliding with velocities between 0.8 and 7.5 cm/s. Our modular electronic skin shows remarkable performance in all terms of sensing, especially dynamic detection. We believe it will enlighten some puzzles in bionic sensors, especially bionic tactility.