Thin-Film Transistor Based Active Taxel for Multimode Tactile Perception and Fused Processing

Skin is the largest-area organ for humans and embodied intelligent robots, serving as a critical interface for environmental interaction. Thanks to the well-organized taxel, dynamic-taxel-density and fully body wrapping, human skin works as an efficient tactile system for embodied intelligent robots to emulate. Thin-film transistor (TFT) technology is a well-known mature semiconductor process for mass production with the largest-area substrate, inherently suitable for artificial skin developing. In this work, we propose an active multimode fused (AMF) artificial skin developed from a standard TFT process for intelligent robots. A novel 2T-1C taxel integrating optical and electrostatic capacitive receptors is developed for cross-modal feature extraction. A 10×10 AMF artificial skin sample within 1 cm² is fabricated and experimentally validated through Braille perception. The AMF skin has high tactile robustness, retaining 81.7% accuracy in complex fingerprint tasks even with 45% information loss. Moreover, a fully skin-wrapped dexterous hand integrated with a dynamic-taxel-density tactile system is presented, enabling accurate texture- and shape-dependent object recognition with 80% less data movement and 76.6% lower computational cost. The TFT-based artificial skin paves an approach for the development of embodied intelligent robots with full-body skin wrapping.