Energy‐Autonomous, Flexible, and Transparent Tactile Skin

Tactile or electronic skin is needed to provide critical haptic perception to robots and amputees, as well as in wearable electronics for health monitoring and wellness applications. Energy autonomy of skin is a critical feature that would enable better portability and longer operation times. This s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advanced functional materials 2017-05, Vol.27 (18), p.n/a
Main Authors: Núñez, Carlos García, Navaraj, William Taube, Polat, Emre O., Dahiya, Ravinder
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autonomy
Electron spin
energy autonomy
Graphene
graphene touch sensors
Materials science
Photovoltaic cells
photovoltaics
Portability
Power consumption
Prostheses
Protective coatings
robotics
Sensors
Stimuli
tactile skin
Touch
Wearable technology
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Summary:Tactile or electronic skin is needed to provide critical haptic perception to robots and amputees, as well as in wearable electronics for health monitoring and wellness applications. Energy autonomy of skin is a critical feature that would enable better portability and longer operation times. This study shows a novel structure, consisting of a transparent tactile sensitive layer based on single‐layer graphene, and a photovoltaic cell underneath as a building block for energy‐autonomous, flexible, and tactile skin. Transparency of the touch sensitive layer is considered a key feature to allow the photovoltaic cell to effectively harvest light. Moreover, ultralow power consumed by the sensitive layer (20 nW cm−2) further reduces the photovoltaic area required to drive the tactile skin. In addition to its energy autonomy, the fabricated skin is sensitive to touch, mainly because a transparent polymeric protective layer, spin‐coated on the sensor's active area, makes the coplanar capacitor sensitive to touch, detecting minimum pressures of 0.11 kPa with a uniform sensitivity of 4.3 Pa−1 along a broad pressure range. Finally, the tactile skin patches are integrated on a prosthetic hand, and the responses of the sensors for static and dynamic stimuli are evaluated by performing tasks, ranging from simple touching to grabbing of soft objects. Single‐layer‐graphene‐based, coplanar, interdigitated capacitive touch sensors are used in this work as building blocks for a transparent, flexible, and energy‐autonomous tactile skin.
ISSN:1616-301X
1616-3028
DOI:10.1002/adfm.201606287