High Sensitivity Flexible Electronic Skin Based on Graphene Film.

Xiaozhou Lü,Liang Zhao,Renjie Chen,Weimin Bao,Jiayi Yang,Liang Qi

doi:10.3390/s19040794

Xiaozhou Lü, Liang Zhao + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19040794

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Abstract

Electronic skin with high sensitivity, rapid response, and long-term stability has great value in robotics, biomedicine, and in other fields. However, electronic skin still has challenges in terms of sensitivity and response time. In order to solve this problem, flexible electronic skin with high sensitivity and the fast response was proposed, based on piezoresistive graphene films. The electronic skin was a pressure sensor array, composed of a tactile sensing unit. Each sensing unit contained three layers: The underlying substrate (polyimide substrate), the middle layer (graphene/polyethylene terephthalate film), and the upper substrate bump (polydimethylsiloxane). The results of the measurement and analysis experiments, designed in this paper, indicated that the flexible electronic skin achieved a positive resistance characteristic in the range of 0 kPa–600 kPa, a sensitivity of /kPa in the range of 0 kPa–4 kPa, a loading response time of 10 ms, and a spatial resolution of 5 mm. In addition, the electronic skin realized shape detection on a regular-shaped object, based on the change in the resistance value of each unit. The high sensitivity flexible electronic skin designed in this paper has important application prospects in medical diagnosis, artificial intelligence, and other fields.

Highlights

Electronic skin is an electronic system which can simulate the perception of human skin [1,2,3]
The results show that the electronic skin could reproduce the appearance of the objects and measure the weight of the objects
We presented an electronic skin which contains 4 × 4 sensing units, based on graphene film

Summary

Introduction

Electronic skin is an electronic system which can simulate the perception of human skin [1,2,3].As electronic skin has the ability to detect pressure [4,5,6,7,8,9], it has received widespread attention in the fields of human health monitoring [10,11,12], medical diagnosis [13], biological research [14,15], artificial intelligence, and other fields [10,16]. Electronic skin is an electronic system which can simulate the perception of human skin [1,2,3]. In order to simulate the human skin pressure sensing system, electronic skin should be able to measure different pressure ranges (less than 10 kPa, and 10–100 kPa), and has the characteristics of high sensitivity and a fast response time [10]. Lipomi et al designed an electronic skin which can measure pressure and tension. This electronic skin could bear up to 150% of the strain, and had conductivity under the tensile state as high as 2200 S/cm, in the range of 0–50 kPa with a sensitivity of

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