Electronic Skins with Ultrahigh Sensitivity and Tough Interfaces

An electronic skin (e-skin) can respond to applied pressure. Existing e-skins, however, often shows limited sensitivity and pressure resolution at elevated pressures, limiting their applications at high pressures. Here, I will introduce a strategy to engineer intrafillable microstructures that can significantly boost the sensitivity and pressure resolution while simultaneously broadening the pressure responding range. Such intrafillable microstructures feature undercuts and grooves that accommodate deformed surface microstructures, effectively enhancing the structural compressibility and the pressure-response range. Sensors with such microstructures present high pressure resolution (18 Pa) over a broad pressure regime (0.08 Pa-360 kPa). This talk will also introduce soft e-skins that have tough interlayer interfaces to achieve high robustness under complicated mechanical modes, and I will show that soft robots with such e-skins can precisely detect pressure distribution during manipulation tasks without any interfacial failure.