Recent Applications of Different Microstructure Designs in High Performance Tactile Sensors: A Review

Flexible tactile sensors have become one of the most attractive research areas because of its great application prospect in electronic skin, healthcare monitoring and artificial intelligence. However, there are still great challenges in mimicking the human skin’s strong ability of tactile perception to the changes of external physical information. Nowadays, in addition to flexible polymers and conductive materials, the microstructure of sensing units is a key factor to improve the performance of tactile sensors such as sensitivity, fast response and robustness. In recent years, a variety of novel microstructure designs have been applied to applications of tactile information perception and numerous corresponding processing methods have also been developed, which provides a wealth of enlightening solutions for the production of electronic skins. Herein, a large number of research results of tactile sensor devices are systematically reviewed according to different three-dimensional geometric shapes of the microstructures which are grouped into several categories. At the same time, relevant processing technologies employed, working principles and chief performance characteristics are also briefly described. Relative merits of different types of microstructure applications are clearly elaborated through the classification and comparison of multiple microstructure geometries in this paper to provide valuable reference for sensing microstructure design and fabrication of tactile sensors in corresponding engineering applications. Moreover, current difficulties and challenges in fabrication of flexible microstructures and future investigative directions pertaining to this field have been discussed.