Development of smart skin for high resolution multi-sensing

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.

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.

With Smart Skin we will create a prototype for artificial skin that will surpass others already existing on the market by responding at the same time to three stimuli: temperature, force and humidity with high spatial resolution and better mimicking with such integrated response the sensitivity of the human skin.

The sensing unit is done 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 core in a piezoresponsive shell.

Nano-structuration of such sensing unit in core-shell site-specific geometrical layouts allows to create a sensing network with spatial resolution down to 1mm (human skins resolution ) and lower.

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 cumulate features from precursors with different solubilities and with engineered composition gradients, which are difficult to obtain by conventional chemical synthesis. Robotics and smart prosthetics would greatly benefit from a more integrated and precise sensoring 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.