Artificial skin perception

Abstract

Skin is the largest organ with the functionalities of protection, regulation and sensation. The emulation of human skin via flexible and stretchable electronics gives rise to electronic skin (e-skin), which has realized artificial sensations and other functions that cannot be achieved by conventional electronics, such as stretchability and self-healing. To date, tremendous progress has been made in data acquisition and transmission for e-skin systems, while the implementation of perception within systems, i.e. sensory data processing, is still in its infancy. Integrating the perception functionality into a flexible and stretchable sensing system, namely artificial skin perception, is critical to endow current e-skin systems with higher intelligence. Here, recent progresses in the design and fabrication of artificial skin perception devices and systems are summarized, as well as challenges and prospects are discussed. The strategies for implementing artificial skin perception utilize either conventional silicon-based circuits or novel flexible computing devices such as memristive devices and synaptic transistors, which enable artificial skin to surpass the human skin with a distributed, low-latency and energy-efficient information processing ability. In future, artificial skin perception would be a new enabling technology to construct next-generation intelligent electronic devices and systems, paving the way for advanced soft robotic applications, such as surgical assistance, rehabilitation, and prosthetics.