Computational E-Skin Using Next Generation Printed Electronics

The electronic skin (e-Skin) in robotics is expected to provide the sensation and perception functionalities just like our own skin. To this end, the e-Skin should have distributed touch sensors and electronics to attain local computation. To this end, we have developed sensors, synaptic transistors and neural-like multi-gate transistors that can mimic the functionality of biological mechanoreceptors, synapse, and neurons, respectively. The devices are realised with low-dimensional materials (i.e., graphene, Si nanowire, ZnO nanowire) using the printing method onto soft substrates. These devices show excellent mechanical flexibility and can be wrapped onto various curvature surfaces. The developed distributed devices emulate several principles discovered in biological neural system, such as long-term potentiation (LTP), long-term depression (LTD), spiking-rate dependent plasticity (SRDP), spatial-temporal integration, all-or-none rule, etc. Finally, based on the demonstrated emerging devices, a computational e-Skin prototype has been demonstrated.