Smart Skin and Flow Sensor Skin Technologies

Humans and animals rely heavily on their skins for survival and exploration. Biological skin is a truly wonderful entity with sophisticated sensory functions. For example, the skin at our fingertips can sense the texture, hardness, thermal conductivity, and temperature of an object on contact, as well as the movement of air.

The skin has these abilities because it is a highly sophisticated and efficient computational fabric. Information gathered at sensor nodes on skin is processed locally, and aggregated sensory data are sent to upper levels of neuron computation. As a biological sensor, skin is mechanically robust and can sustain large deformation. Currently, no engineered sensors exist with a similar scale of functional complexity, robustness, and data efficiency.

Chang Liu of the University of Illinois is developing the polymer microfabrication technology needed for producing artificial sensitive skins--large area, flexible surfaces with integrated, distributed sensors and semiconductor, signal-processing electronic. The artificial skin, motivated by biological counterparts, would consist of multiple sensor types to achieve sensory integration and data aggregation. The sensors and circuits will be located on flexible substrates with two-dimensional bending capabilities.

The project may benefit some DoD and Navy applications, including the detection of distributed flow characteristics around autonomous underwater vehicles or objects, smart acoustic surfaces and tactile sensors for robotics exploration.