Highly Flexible Multilayered e-Skins for Thermal-Magnetic-Mechanical Triple Sensors and Intelligent Grippers

This work reports a novel triple-functional electronic skin (e-skin) which shows both wonderful thermal-magnetic-mechanical sensing performance and interesting magnetic actuation behavior. The flexible e-skin comprises thermo-sensitive, magnetic, and conductive tri-components, and their sensitive characteristics under 5-70 °C, 0-1200 mT, and 0.1-5.1 MΩ are studied, respectively. Owing to the unique piezoresistive characteristic and magnetorheological effect, the e-skin exhibits a rapid response time (38 ms) to the external stimuli. The assembled e-skin with the triple-layer structure can act as a functional sensor to monitor various human motions, magnetic fields, and environmental temperatures. Based on this e-skin, an intelligent magneto-active gripper is further developed, and it can be used to grasp and transport targets by the actuated force of magnetic field under various working conditions. Importantly, the multi-functional sensing capability endows the gripper with real-time deformation and ambient temperature perception characteristics. As a result, because of the ideal multi-field coupling sensing and magnetic active features, this e-skin shows a wide prospect in wearable electronics, man-machine interactions, and intelligent transport systems.