Tactile Sensor Arrays May Benefit Skin Monitoring

The manipulator can smooth grabbed soft fragile tofu, weight only 5 mg of small spiders, its motion sensor can be accurately captured, recently, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) (hereinafter referred to as the "Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)") Hu Hong joint team, a professor at city university of Hong Kong Yang recruited professor bao team is put forward based on the piezoelectric thin film, tactile sensor array with row + column electrode structure, relevant results published in the journal of Advanced Science.

The research provides a new strategy for tactile sensor design that is expected to benefit areas such as electronic skin, health monitoring, animal movement detection, and robotics. "There are three main innovations in this research."

According to Hu Hong, the multifunctional tactile sensor array can measure the pressure, bending radius and bending direction, and at the same time distinguish the mode of external stimulus in real-time, realizing the automatic decoupling of various measurement modes.

At the same time, the sensor array adopts the horizontal and vertical electrode structure, which reduces the number of electrodes leads from N × M to N + M, which greatly reduces the production cost and difficulty. Besides, the problem of signal crosstalk in the piezoelectric sensor array with transverse and longitudinal electrodes is solved.

At present, a flexible tactile sensor array faces many challenges in its application.

Existing tactile sensor arrays often only have a single function, and large area and high-resolution sensor arrays need a large number of electrode leads. The two teams proposed an array of tactile sensors that can sense and distinguish in real-time the size, position, and pattern of various external stimuli, including slight touches, presses, and bends.

At the same time, its unique design overcomes the crosstalk problem that exists in other piezoelectric sensors. Pressure and bend testing demonstrated that the proposed tactile sensor array is characterized by high sensitivity (7.7 mV/kPa), long-term durability (80,000 cycles) and rapid response time (10 ms). The tactile sensor array has also demonstrated excellent scalability and the ability to be easily manufactured on a large scale.

In recent years, flexible electronic skin has been a hot topic in academia and industry, among which bionic tactile sensor used to imitate human skin function is one of the focuses of research. Tactile sensors can generate corresponding electrical signals to external stress stimulation, which are widely used in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, biological information detection and other fields.

Understanding the perceptual principle of human skin is an important prerequisite for designing bionic tactile sensors.

It is understood that the human body's skin is a very "powerful" tactile sensor, it can simultaneously detect all kinds of stimulation intensity and pattern, can distinguish press, tapping and bending, this can be attributed to four mechanoreceptors (SA - I, II, and FA - I, II) distribution in different areas of the human body skin, mechanical sensor receiving external stimuli and transform it into electrical signals, the receptor four integrated signal analysis by the brain, and then get the information such as size, shape and texture object.

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