Tactile Electronic Skin Based on Conductive Fabric for Robotic Hand Applications

Tactile electronic skin (e-skin) has multitude of potential applications, such as a prosthetic artificial skin, wearable sensors and health monitoring. However, current fabrication methods tend to involve complex processing or materials that are not widely available. In this paper, we show that high quality capacitive tactile sensors for an e-skin can be fabricated by sandwiching a microstructured dielectric elastomer layer between two conductive fabric electrodes. The fabric can be easily cut to quickly prototype different sensor configuration and can be bent into three dimensional shapes. The fabricated sensors display excellent linearity and very little long-term drift. We demonstrate the integration of these sensors in an anthropomorphic robotic hand, which is entirely fabricated using rapid prototyping techniques.