Water-Modulated Biomimetic Hyper-Attribute-Gel Electronic Skin for Robotics and Skin-Attachable Wearables

Electronic skin (e-skin), mimicking the physical–chemical
and sensory properties of human skin, is promising to be applied as
robotic skins and skin-attachable wearables with multisensory functionalities.
To date, most e-skins are dedicated to sensory function development
to mimic human skins in one or several aspects, yet advanced e-skin
covering all the hyper-attributes (including both the sensory and
physical–chemical properties) of human skins is seldom reported.
Herein, a water-modulated biomimetic hyper-attribute-gel (Hygel) e-skin
with reversible gel–solid transition is proposed, which exhibits
all the desired skin-like physical–chemical properties (stretchability,
self-healing, biocompatibility, biodegradability, weak acidity, antibacterial
activities, flame retardance, and temperature adaptivity), sensory
properties (pressure, temperature, humidity, strain, and contact),
function reconfigurability, and evolvability. Then the Hygel e-skin
is applied as an on-robot e-skin and skin-attached wearable to demonstrate
its highly skin-like attributes in capturing multiple sensory information,
reconfiguring desired functions, and excellent skin compatibility
for real-time gesture recognition via deep learning. This Hygel e-skin
may find more applications in advanced robotics and even skin-replaceable
artificial skin.