Electronic Skin Printed Synaptic Transistors Feel E-Skin
MIT engineers fabricated a wireless electronic skin, and now, the scientists from the University of Glasgow created an e-skin that draws inspiration from how the human peripheral nervous system decodes signals in order to reduce latency as well as power consumption. To achieve this, the team printed a grid of 168 synaptic transistors made from zinc-oxide nanowires directly onto the surface of a flexible plastic surface.



These synaptic transistors were then connected to the skin sensors over the palm of a human-shaped robot hand, and when touched, it registered a change in its electrical resistance. In other words, a small change means a light touch, while pressing harder creates a larger variance in resistance, thus mimicking the way sensory neurons work in the human body.

Electronic Skin Printed Synaptic Transistors Feel E-Skin

What we’ve been able to create through this process is an electronic skin capable of distributed learning at the hardware level, which doesn’t need to send messages back and forth to a central processor before taking action. Instead, it greatly accelerates the process of responding to touch by cutting down the amount of computation required. We believe that this is a real step forward in our work towards creating large-scale neuromorphic printed electronic skin capable of responding appropriately to stimuli,” said the scientists.