Bio-Inspired Hybrid Dielectric for Capacitive and Triboelectric Tactile Sensors with High Sensitivity and Ultrawide Linearity Range

The trade-off between sensitivity and linearity is critical for preserving the high pressure-resolution over a broad range and simplifying the signal processing/conversion of flexible tactile sensors. Conventional dielectrics suffer from the difficulty of quantitatively controlling the interacted mechanical and dielectric properties, thus causing the restricted sensitivity and linearity of capacitive sensors. Herein, inspired by human skin, a novel hybrid dielectric composed of a low-permittivity (low-k) micro-cilia array, a high-permittivity (high-k) rough surface, and micro-dome array is developed. The pressure-induced series-parallel conversion between the low-k and high-k components of the hybrid dielectric enables the linear effective dielectric constant and controllable initial/resultant capacitance. The gradient compressibility of the hybrid dielectric enables the linear behavior of elastic modulus with pressures, which derives the capacitance variation determined by the effective dielectric constant. Therefore, an ultrawide linearity range up to 1000 kPa and a high sensitivity of 0.314 kPa(-1) are simultaneously achieved by the optimized hybrid dielectric. The design is also applicable for triboelectric tactile sensors, which realizes the similar linear behavior of output voltage and enhanced sensitivity. With the high pressure-resolution across a broad range, potential applications such as healthcare monitoring in diverse scenarios and control command conversion via a single sensor are demonstrated.