Engineering Fellowships for Growth: Printable Tactile Skin

近年来，帮助老年人等社会需求和快速的技术进步已经改变了机器人。为了将机器人的应用范围扩展到高度互动的任务，例如照顾老人，人们希望机器人能够自主，同时能够安全地与现实世界的物体进行交互。然而，实现能够完成这些任务的机器人是具有挑战性的，因为它们经常使用的环境模型是不完整的，这强调了传感器以足够的速度获取信息以处理外部变化的重要性。在机器人技术中，迄今为止最优秀的传感方式是多种形式的视觉，例如激光，或者简单的传统相机的立体排列。另一方面，动物世界使用更广泛的感觉模式。触觉/触摸感应尤其重要，因为许多互动任务涉及物理接触，这些接触携带着宝贵的信息，这些信息被生物大脑利用，应该被机器人利用，以确保适应性行为。然而，缺乏合适的触觉皮肤技术使这项任务变得困难。PRINTSKIN将开发一种鲁棒的超柔性触觉皮肤，赋予最先进的机器人手触觉皮肤，并通过使用机器人手大面积的触觉信息来验证皮肤，以处理不同曲率的日常物体。触觉皮肤将以现有的半刚性皮肤为基准，如欧盟项目ROBOSKIN和Hex-O-Skin的iCub皮肤。这种皮肤将在至少两种不同的工业机器人手（Shadow Hand和i-Limb）上进行验证，这两种机器人手用于灵巧的操作和假肢。坚固的超薄触觉皮肤将使用一种创新的方法来开发，包括在聚酰亚胺等超柔性衬底上印刷高迁移率材料（如硅）。触觉皮肤将有固态传感器（触摸、温度）和电子元件，印刷在聚酰亚胺等超柔性基板上。背板中基于硅纳米线的超薄有源矩阵电子器件将覆盖一层可更换的软换能器层。将电子和传感模块集成在箔片上或作为箔片堆栈进行探索。“真正自下而上的方法”是PRINTSKIN方法的显著特点，因为触觉皮肤的开发将从纳米线的原子合成开始，并以触觉皮肤系统的开发结束-就像大自然使用蛋白质和大分子构建复杂生物系统的方式一样。这种打印触觉皮肤的新技术平台将使柔性基板上的全新一代高性能和经济高效的系统成为可能。通过印刷制造将对在大面积和非传统基材（如塑料或纸张）上具有成本效益的集成具有重要意义。高性能电子产品的印刷也具有无掩模方法，减少材料浪费和大面积可扩展性的吸引力。因此，拟议的方案有可能模仿电子行业的另一场革命，并引发包括机器人、医疗保健和可穿戴电子产品在内的各个部门的转型。

The societal needs such as helping elderly and rapid technological advances have transformed robotics in recent years. Making robots autonomous and at the same time able to interact safely with real world objects is desired in order to extend their range of applications to highly interactive tasks such as caring for the elderly. However, attaining robots capable of doing such tasks is challenging as the environmental model they often use is incomplete, which underlines the importance of sensors to obtain information at a sufficient rate to deal with external change. In robotics, the sensing modality par excellence so far has been vision in its multiple forms, for example lasers, or simply stereoscopic arrangements of conventional cameras. On other hand the animal world uses a wider variety of sensory modalities. The tactile/touch sensing is particularly important as many of the interactive tasks involve physical contact which carry precious information that is exploited by biological brains and ought to be exploited by robots to ensure adaptive behaviour. However, the absence of suitable tactile skin technology makes this task difficult. PRINTSKIN will develop a robust ultra-flexible tactile skin and endow state-of-the-art robotic hand with the tactile skin and validate the skin by using tactile information from large areas of robot hands to handle daily object with different curvatures. The tactile skin will be benchmarked against available semi-rigid skins such as iCub skin from EU project ROBOSKIN and Hex-O-Skin. The skin will be validated on at least two different industrial robotic hands (Shadow Hand and i-Limb) that are used in dexterous manipulation and prosthetics.The robust ultra-thin tactile skin will be developed using an innovative methodology involving printing of high-mobility materials such as silicon on ultra-flexible substrates such as polyimide. The tactile skin will have solid-state sensors (touch, temperature) and electronics printed on ultra-flexible substrates such as polyimide. The silicon-nanowires based ultra-thin active-matrix electronics in the backplane will be covered with a replaceable soft transducer layer. Integration of electronic and sensing modules on a foil or as stack of foils will be explored. 'Truly bottom-up approach' is the distinguishing feature of PRINTSKIN methodology as the development of tactile skin will begin with atom by atom synthesis of nanowires and finish with the development of tactile skin system - much like the way nature uses proteins and macromolecules to construct complex biological systems. This new technological platform to print tactile skin will enable an entirely new generation of high-performance and cost-effective systems on flexible substrates. Fabrication by printing will have important implications for cost-effective integration over large areas and on nonconventional substrates, such as plastic or paper. Printing of high-performance electronics is also appealing for mask-less approach, reduced material wastage, and scalability to large area. The proposed programme thus has the potential to emulate yet another revolution in the electronics industry and trigger transformation in various sectors including, robotics, healthcare, and wearable electronics.