A Flexible Multifunctional Electronic Skin for Intelligent Tactile Perception

Abstract

The electronic skin has accurate digital sensing capability and human-like skin structure to realize in situ measurement and perception. It has broad application prospects, such as artificial intelligence, health monitoring, and robotics. However, multifunction integration, structure design, and signal demodulation are still the key points that hinder the development of e-skin. To solve this problem and for the application of robotic fingers, we propose a new multifunctional electronic skin in this article with five sensing functions, including temperature, thermosensation, pressure, wind speed and wind direction. It also has the characteristics of softness and smallness, which is suitable for fingers. Considering the geometry and application scenario of the “finger-sensor-object” touch, a new transient heat conduction model is developed and validated, which can achieve quantitative sensing and calculating of the material’s thermal parameters. Six objects were quantitatively identified in the experiments. Moreover, an interactive control logic between sensors and smart robots is innovatively proposed to improve the utilization of sensor-sensitive units. The proposed flexible multifunctional electronic skin provides a new idea for the application of wearable smart devices and intelligent sensing of robots.