Triboelectric and microfluidic integrated self-generated tactile sensor

Abstract

Here a flexible self-generated tactile sensor based on liquid-solid triboelectric and microfluidic integration is proposed. The tactile sensor has 4 microfluidic channels in order to facilitate normal force and shear force sensing. Each microfluidic channel has multiple electrodes lying underneath. For normal force sensing, all the microfluidic channels show similar performance with linear sensing range of 40 N and sensitivity of ~0.03 N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> . For shear force sensing, the tactile sensor is able to differentiate the direction of the applied force based on the output ratio from different channels. The proposed tactile sensor has great potential for diversified applications such as 3D tactile sensing, laptop mouse control, robotics, etc.