A flexible triboelectric tactile sensor for simultaneous material and texture recognition

Abstract

Electronic skin with tactile perception enables intelligent robots and prostheses to perform dexterous manipu- lation and natural interaction with the human and surroundings. However, using single tactile sensing mecha- nism to simultaneously percept geometry features and materials properties remains a challenge due to the bottleneck of signal decoupling. Herein, we report the MTSensing system – a wireless and fully-integrated tactile sensing system that can simultaneously recognize materials and textures based on a single flexible triboelectric sensor. The proposed triboelectric sensor converts touch into electrical signals and meanwhile, the signal pro- cessing pipeline decouples the signals into macro/micro features and feeds them into the corresponding deep learning models, which simultaneously predict the materials and textures of the contacted objects with the ac- curacies of 99.07% and 99.32%, respectively. The systematic integration of MTSensing hopes to pave the way for deploying low-cost and scalable electronic skin with multi-functional perceptions.

Zihan Wang

Postdoctoral Scholar

My research interests include soft robot and flexible sensor. Welcome to contact me.