Electronic Skin

A soft, bendable, large-area tactile sensing layer applied to a robot's surface, mimicking human skin.

Electronic skin refers to a flexible, stretchable, large-area sensing layer that conforms to curved surfaces, mimicking human or animal skin in sensing pressure, temperature, and strain; some materials can even self-heal. Common sensing principles are piezoresistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, and magnetic, built from large arrays of individual sensing elements (taxels). The field originated in flexible-electronics and materials research and is also used in prosthetics and wearable health monitoring. On a robot, electronic skin can cover the palm, an arm, or even the entire body, sensing contact location, human-robot collisions, and grip pressure distribution — things a fingertip-sized vision-based tactile sensor simply can't do. The difficulties are wear resistance, wiring and cross-talk between elements, and keeping the taxels consistent and calibrated. A representative example is ReSkin (CoRL 2021), from Meta and Carnegie Mellon University, which uses magnetic sensing so the skin's surface layer can be swapped out and replaced.

ExampleApplying a layer of piezoresistive electronic skin to a dexterous hand's palm and reading out each taxel's pressure during a grasp produces a pressure-distribution map showing which region of the palm the object presses on, and how hard.

Also called

E-Skin, Robot Skin, Flexible Tactile Sensor

Related

Tactile Sensor · Piezoresistive Tactile Sensing · Capacitive Tactile Sensing · Taxel · ReSkin / AnySkin · Vision-Based Tactile Sensor

Sources

Electronic skin（Wikipedia）
ReSkin: versatile, replaceable, lasting tactile skins (arXiv 2111.00071)
Meta AI: Teaching robots to perceive, understand, and interact through touch