Electronic Skin from High-Throughput Fabrication of Intrinsically Stretchable Lead Zirconate Titanate Elastomer

Abstract

Electronic skin made of thin, soft, stretchable devices that can mimic the human skin and reconstruct the tactile sensation and perception offers great opportunities for prosthesis sensing, robotics controlling, and human-machine interfaces. Advanced materials and mechanics engineering of thin film devices has proven to be an efficient route to enable and enhance flexibility and stretchability of various electronic skins; however, the density of devices is still low owing to the limitation in existing fabrication techniques. Here, we report a high-throughput one-step process to fabricate large tactile sensing arrays with a sensor density of 25 sensors/cm2 for electronic skin, where the sensors are based on intrinsically stretchable piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) elastomer. The PZT elastomer sensor arrays with great uniformity and passive-driven manner enable high-resolution tactile sensing, simplify the data acquisition process, and lower the manufacturing cost. The high-throughput fabrication process provides a general platform for integrating intrinsically stretchable materials into large area, high device density soft electronics for the next-generation electronic skin.