Development of smart skin for high resolution multi-sensing

Introduction

Artificial skins are made of sensors embedded in flexible matrices that record several stimuli from the environment and transform them into measurable signals. At the moment, different sensors have to be implemented in the electronic skin matrix for each stimulus.

Current Challenges

As a result, the existing technologies are complex, expensive, sometimes based on toxic materials, or are not able to demonstrate multi-stimuli responsiveness and high resolution.

Project Overview

With Smart Skin, we will create a prototype for artificial skin that will surpass others already existing on the market by responding simultaneously to three stimuli:

1. Temperature
2. Force
3. Humidity

This will be achieved with high spatial resolution, better mimicking the sensitivity of human skin through such integrated responses.

Sensing Unit Design

The sensing unit is designed by a combination of two materials to reduce the required number of active sensing layers while still being capable of multi-stimuli responsiveness. A smart material, responsive to humidity and temperature, is integrated as the core in a piezoresponsive shell.

Nano-structuration

Nano-structuration of such sensing units in core-shell site-specific geometrical layouts allows for the creation of a sensing network with spatial resolution down to 1mm (the resolution of human skin) and lower.

Fabrication Techniques

This unique architecture is achieved thanks to the use of state-of-the-art fabrication techniques with high control over material properties, as well as material uniformity. The advantage of using dry, vapor-based processing is that it is possible to accumulate features from precursors with different solubilities and with engineered composition gradients, which are difficult to obtain by conventional chemical synthesis.

Applications

Robotics and smart prosthetics would greatly benefit from more integrated and precise sensing information. Enabling these new features would make robots used in households, for example, aware of dangerous increases in temperature and, in general, more human-friendly because they would be more responsive.