The sense of touch is of great importance to human daily life. Likewise, robots can benefit from touch sensing to perceive the surrounding, especially information about the interacted object. Nevertheless, designing flexible sensors for soft robotics remains a challenge. Here, we introduced a emerging flexible tactile sensor, single electrode triboelectric nanogenerator, into robotics. With the designed portable data acquisition devices, the external mechanical stimuli can be converted to the corresponding current/voltage signal. Additionally, the sensor also functions as a proximity sensor when it operates in the voltage mode. With the sensors and soft robot gripper, objects detection and identification experiments are performed, to the show its great potential in robotics .

For more information, please contact Dr. Zhenshan Bing.