E-skin can produce tactile feedback

In recent years, materials scientists and engineers have introduced increasingly sophisticated materials for robotic and prosthetic applications, including a range of electronic skins, or e-skins, designed to sense the surrounding environment and artificially reproduce the sense of touch.

As explained on techxplore.com, researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing recently introduced a new dual-modal tactile e-skin that could enhance the sensing capabilities of robots, while also allowing them to communicate information by leveraging a human user’s sense of touch. This e-skin, presented in a paper posted on the preprint server arXiv and accepted by IEEE ICRA 2024, can both sense tactile information and produce tactile feedback, thus enabling bidirectional touch-based, human–robot interactions (HRIs).

The primary objective of the recent study was to develop a dual-modal electronic skin that would also respond to contact forces, via the bidirectional transmission of tactile information. To achieve this, the e-skin they introduced integrates multimodal magnetic tactile sensing with vibration feedback.

The researchers tested a prototype of their e-skin in a series of experiments, also exploring its potential for three primary application possibilities: object recognition, precise weighing and immersive HRI. The research could lead to more advanced robotic manipulation, enable more precise control in industrial robots, and open new routes for the development of sophisticated prosthetic limbs.

Source: Tech Xplore