Ultra-Thin Graphene Foam (Gii) Based Flexible Piezoresistive Pressure Sensors for Robotics
Highlights
- Pressure sensors are widely used devices in a variety of sectors from automotive, medical, industrial and consumer devices.
- Currently flexible pressure sensors are primarily based on capacitive, resistive and piezoelectric methods.
- Advanced materials such as Gii has been proposed as a promising material due to enhanced electric properties (fast device response, low recovery time and low power consumption), mechanical properties (high durability, conformability) providing compatibility with flexible substrates.
- NAs the sensors are still in the initial fabrication process more data needs to be collected and analyzed to fully understand the exciting implications these sensors can provide for a variety of industries.
Abstract
Over recent year, robotics has made a drastic impact in a variety of different markets. Although having many advantages from, safer workspace to speed and efficiency there are several drawbacks all ranging from their lack of ability to execute functions and tasks easily performed by humans. This is mainly due to their lack of ability to implement touch and haptic feedback. In this work, we show the use and applicability of ultra-thin graphene foam (GRF), with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) embedded into and over the structure, as an active layer in piezoresistive based pressure sensors for use in robotic touch sensing applications.
It has been demonstrated in this work that thin GRF/PDMS-GRF consisting of a few layers of graphene is able to present sensitivity to pressures within the range of 0 to >100kPa. Although pressure sensitivities are not yet comparable to those of current work, it must be noted that the GRF, Gii used in this work is much thinner in comparison, consisting of only several layers of graphene.
Introduction
Robotics has made a huge impact in a variety of different industries ranging from mass production/manufacturing, assembly, packaging, transport, earth and space exploration, contactless surgery etc.
Wearable electronics and bendable displays have also made many advancements in recent years [1,2]. Within robotics and wearable electronics, the use of pressure sensors is vital to provide either an input system [3] or information to robotic systems so that they have human-like dexterity, motor skills and physical abilities [4].
Robotics with these human-like skills will be able to tell how much pressure is needed to pick an object up without damaging or to be able to sense if an object needs turned in-order to perform a certain task and not just operate on a binary “on-off” process. Robotics often fail to reach their full potential due to these drawbacks, and often fail to execute tasks easily conducted by humans. For robotics to reach their full potential, pressure sensors capable of providing distributed touch and haptic feedback are required to be implemented into the main body of the robotic systems [5,6].