Researchers develop electronic skins that wirelessly activate fully soft robots

A research team of Seoul National University has developed a skin-like electronic system that is soft, thin, lightweight and can wirelessly activate soft robots through a simple lamination process. They developed an electronic skin (e-skin) pair as a two-part, wireless soft driving system based on fully printable, stretchable hybrid electronics. One part is the e-skin for input sensing at a human side, and the other for activating soft robots. The e-skins are soft (same material for the target robot body), thin ( 1 mm), and lightweight ( 0.8 g) and also feature the spatially fragmented circuit configuration with a slew of miniature IC components (standard dimension, 1.5 mm 1.5 mm). Therefore, they can be stretched and conformed onto the dynamic surface like human skin or soft robots.