Energy-autonomous, flexible, and transparent tactile skin

Núñez, CG, Navaraj, WT ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4753-2015, Polat, EO and Dahiya, R, 2017. Energy-autonomous, flexible, and transparent tactile skin. Advanced Functional Materials, 27 (18): 1606287. ISSN 1616-301X

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Abstract

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, spincoated 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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Advanced Functional Materials
Creators:	Núñez, C.G., Navaraj, W.T., Polat, E.O. and Dahiya, R.
Publisher:	WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co.
Date:	11 May 2017
Volume:	27
Number:	18
ISSN:	1616-301X
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1002/adfm.201606287 DOI
Rights:	© 2017 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	14 Aug 2019 14:06
Last Modified:	03 Sep 2019 10:19
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37311

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