A flexible triboelectric tactile sensor for simultaneous material and texture recognition

Electronic skin with tactile perception enables intelligent robots and prostheses to perform dexterous manipulation and natural interaction with the human and surroundings. However, using single tactile sensing mechanism to simultaneously percept geometry features and materials properties remains a challenge due to the bottleneck of signal decoupling. Herein, we report the MTSensing system – a wireless and fully-integrated tactile sensing system that can simultaneously recognize materials and textures based on a single flexible triboelectric sensor. The proposed triboelectric sensor converts touch into electrical signals and meanwhile, the signal processing pipeline decouples the signals into macro/micro features and feeds them into the corresponding deep learning models, which simultaneously predict the materials and textures of the contacted objects with the accuracies of 99.07% and 99.32%, respectively. The systematic integration of MTSensing hopes to pave the way for deploying low-cost and scalable electronic skin with multi-functional perceptions.