Flexible Electronic Skin: From Humanoids to Humans

With robots entering our lives in a number of ways, their safe interaction, while operating autonomously, has gained significant attention. We no longer speak of robots as only the industrial tools needed for repetitive tasks such as picking and placing, or robots kept away from people. Not that such tasks are unimportant, it is that significant progresses have been made in these application areas and now the focus is gradually shifting toward robots handling real-world objects under arbitrary circumstances, working safely alongside humans, and assisting them. The physical interaction by touching is important during such tasks to get an estimation of contact parameters (e.g., force, soft contact, hardness, texture, temperature, etc.) and this makes the tactile/touch sensors and haptic feedback critical for robot technology, which is opening up more and more applications [1] This trend will continue as we enter the era of smart factories, Industry 4.0, social robots, telesurgery, and so on, where robots are intended to work closely with human. Robotics is set to become the driving technology underpinning a whole new generation of autonomous devices and cognitive artifacts, providing a link between the digital and physical world. In fact, we are looking at a profound evolution, where artificial intelligent (AI) systems could be extended into robots with new embodiments for applications such as brain-controlled robots and haptic avatars [2]. New automation concepts such as human-robot collaboration (HRC) and cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are recognized as having the potential to impact and revolutionize the production landscape. A rich sensorization will be critical to such advances endowed with a large number of different sensors types (touch, temperature, pain, electrochemical, gas sensors, idiothetic sensing, etc.). Critical to these advances are the ways in which the technological advances are managed or made to develop electronic skin (e-skin) and the way it is employed to understand various dimensions of physical interaction in unconstrained environments [3].