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SNU researchers developed electronic skins that wirelessly activate fully soft robots
by Staff Writers
Seoul, South Korea (SPX) Jun 25, 2018

Rendered version of the e-skin pair system for soft robots.

A research team of Seoul National University (Co-senior authors: Professor Yongtaek Hong, Jaeha Kim, and Kyu-Jin Cho) has developed a skin-like electronic system that is soft, thin, lightweight and can wirelessly activate soft robots through a simple lamination process.

They developed an electronic skin (e-skin) pair as a two-part, wireless soft driving system based on a fully printable "stretchable hybrid electronics" approach. One part is the e-skin for input sensing at a human side, and the other for activating soft robots.

The e-skins are soft (same material for the target robot body), thin (<1 mm), and lightweight (~0.8 g) and also feature the spatially fragmented circuit configuration with a slew of miniature IC components (standard dimension, <1.5 mm + 1.5 mm). Therefore, they can be stretched and conformed onto the dynamic surface like human skin or soft robots.

The electronic functionality of this system is "wireless inter-skin communication". The e-skin pair can perform wireless communication of the four-state control signal at a distance of more than 5m, and the embedded encoding mechanism makes the inter-skin communication noise-tolerant.

The proposed e-skins can be softly, compactly, and reversibly assembled into soft robot frames to activate muscle-like soft actuators without interfering with their soft motions. Benefits of this e-skin-mediated soft robotic assembly include coadaptive movement that helps the robot pass through and/or operate in highly confined spaces, whose cross section is even smaller than the robot size.

Furthermore, the proposed e-skin pair and corresponding wireless inter-skin communication concept can wirelessly activate multiple types of soft robots through reversible assembly of the e-skins.

The researchers said, "Soft robots have great advantages in organically integrating every robot components without rigid boundaries, but current soft robotic designs still rely on rigid components mostly in driving parts. This e-skin opens a new avenue for soft robotic assembly. It is soft, thin, and light enough for a robot not to be perceptible, but it can activate the robot as 'a driving skin'."

The research will be published in the 18th issue of Science Robotics on May 30, 2018.


Related Links
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ROBO SPACE
A fast, low-voltage actuator for soft and wearable robotics
Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Jun 18, 2018
In the world of robotics, soft robots are the new kids on the block. The unique capabilities of these automata are to bend, deform, stretch, twist or squeeze in all the ways that conventional rigid robots cannot. Today, it is easy to envision a world in which humans and robots collaborate - in close proximity - in many realms. Emerging soft robots may help to ensure that this can be done safely, and in a way that syncs to human environments or even interfaces with humans themselves. "Some of ... read more

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