Electronic Skin: Achievements, Issues and Trends

The skin is one of the main organs of the human body and as such it implements many different and relevant functions, e.g. protection of the inner body organs, detection of cutaneous stimuli, etc. Due to its complexity, the development of artificial, or better, electronic skin (e-skin) is a very challenging goal which involves many different and complementary research areas. Nonetheless, the possible application areas are many and very relevant: e.g. humanoids and industrial robotics, artificial prosthetics, biomedical instrumentation, cyber physical systems, for naming a few. Many research groups are addressing the development of e-skin and the research scenario is exciting and continuously evolving. Due to its very peculiar features, the development of electronic skin can be effectively tackled using a holistic approach. Starting from the system specification definition, the mechanical arrangement of the skin itself (i.e. soft or rigid mechanical support, structural and functional material layers, etc.) needs to be designed and fabricated together with the electronic embedded system, to move toward aspects such as tactile data processing algorithms and the communication channel interface. In this paper, we present and assess the achievements of our research group in this field focusing on the following aspects: (i) The manufacturing technology of sensor arrays based on piezoelectric polymer (PVDF) transduction; (ii) The mixed-mode interface electronics; (iii) The tactile data processing algorithms; (iv) The electronic embedded system. Future trends and research perspectives will be also presented.