Tactile Sensing for Soft Robotics and Wearables

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, rapid developments in tactile sensing have mainly been due to the advent of novel deformable materials, mimicking skin flexibility and elasticity. In addition to single sensors, electronic skins built from both inorganic and organic electronic materials have boosted up, especially ultra-thin and ultra-conformable systems. However, many aspects require new concepts at component, as well as at system, levels. For example, effective solutions for achieving multimodality are needed. Indeed, information of various types (e.g., pressure, temperature, humidity, etc.) should be detected in a robust and reliable manner, and in large area issues of real-time signal processing are posed, as well of wiring and connections. Additionally, today, new challenges emerge from soft robotic approaches and wearable systems, where the use of deformable sensors becomes crucial for encoding a variety of information that are not only provided by the external world, but also by the deformation of the hosting robot/human body. This Special Issue seeks to showcase research papers, short communications, and review articles on novel developments of soft tactile sensing, and mechanical sensing more at large. The focus is on new designs and models, new materials and fabrication processes, advanced signal processing and innovative machine learning algorithms that could be useful to target real applications in both in robotics and wearable systems, e.g., biomimetic skins, smart surgical tools, wearables for monitoring vital parameters (e.g., body temperature, blood pulse) and body movements.

Dr. Lucia Beccai
Dr. Massimo Totaro
Guest Editors

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