Multimodal, wearable sensors with tactile communication capabilities for human and robotic applications

We demonstrate a multimodal, wearable device with haptics-based communication that enables wearers to perceive environmental hazards through vibrations. The device monitors gaseous, aerosolized, and aqueous contaminants and conveys threshold events via distinct tactile codes. Energy harvesting with low power sensing methods yield a high-fidelity system with day long operation. Communication can be extended from humans to robots by engineering a soft electronic skin (e-skin) incorporating an array of transducers embedded in silicone that resolves the temporal structure of the tactile codes. On a quadrupedal robot, the e-skin decodes haptic sequences to trigger adaptive re-routing upon detecting chemical hazards, bypassing the need for wireless communication. Our approach introduces a framework in which chemical awareness is communicated physically rather than electronically, opening opportunities for embodied intelligence, distributed sensing, and human-robot interactions.