Abstract
Electronic skins (e-skins) are devices that can respond to mechanical stimuli and enable robots to perceive their surroundings. A great challenge for existing e-skins is that they may easily fail under extreme mechanical conditions due to their multilayered architecture with mechanical mismatch and weak adhesion between the interlayers. Here we report a flexible pressure sensor with tough interfaces enabled by two strategies: quasi-homogeneous composition that ensures mechanical match of interlayers, and interlinked microconed interface that results in a high interfacial toughness of 390 J·m−2. The tough interface endows the sensor with exceptional signal stability determined by performing 100,000 cycles of rubbing, and fixing the sensor on a car tread and driving 2.6 km on an asphalt road. The topological interlinks can be further extended to soft robot-sensor integration, enabling a seamless interface between the sensor and robot for highly stable sensing performance during manipulation tasks under complicated mechanical conditions.
Highlights
Electronic skins (e-skins) are devices that can respond to mechanical stimuli and enable robots to perceive their surroundings
Prosthetics, and other machines gain sensory functions when equipped with electronic skins (e-skins) or flexible pressure sensors[1–6], which play the role of mechanoreceptors in human skin
The interlinks can be applied to the soft robot-sensor interface, and we demonstrate the seamless integration of a soft robot and sensors, both made of PDMS-CNTs composites, for pressure and strain sensing during demanding gripping tasks without any interfacial failure or fatigue
Summary
Design of the integrated all PDMS-CNTs pressure sensor. In conventional multilayered e-skins, the functional layers are stacked on top of each other without introducing interlayer bonding (Fig. 1a)[16,21–25], and the layers in such devices will separate or delaminate when exposed to in-plane compressive stresses or shear stresses (Fig. 1b). The CNTs doping leads to increased Young’s modulus of the composite, the small difference can hardly cause mechanical mismatch Such a mechanical match cannot be achieved in other sensor designs that include a soft dielectric layer and metal- or plastic-based electrodes. Because of its elastic dissipation and discrete rupture mode features, the microstructured interface exhibits a high interfacial toughness close to 400 J·m–2, which is comparable to the fracture toughness of pure PDMS (Supplementary Fig. 6). The doping by CNTs determines the function of different layers (electrode or dielectric), and significantly boosts the signal magnitude of the sensor by over 30 times through a synergetic effect of composition and microstructure design. Our a b Dielectric : PDMS/CNTs - 2 wt%
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