Drift-Free Ionotronic Sensing
摘要
Skin-like soft pressure sensors enable artificial haptic technologies for myriad applications in robotics, healthcare and beyond. A soft sensor must detect pressure with both high sensitivity and high accuracy. However, for existing soft pressure sensors, viscoelastic creep of the soft materials causes signal drift, which can result in unreliable measurements that might lead to an incorrect trigger or safety concerns. Among the many types of soft pressure sensor, ionotronic sensors exhibit superior sensing properties owing to the nanoscale charge separation at the electric double layer. However, signal drift is particularly prevalent in ionotronic sensors owing to leakage of the ionic solvent, in addition to the viscoelastic creep. This talk will introduce our recent advances in realizing drift-free ionotronic sensing. We do so by designing and copolymerizing a leakage-free and creep-free polyelectrolyte elastomer containing two types of segments: charged segments having fixed cations to prevent ion leakage and neutral slippery segments with a high crosslink density for low creep. We show that an ionotronic sensor using the polyelectrolyte elastomer barely drifts under an ultrahigh static pressure of 500 kPa (close to its Young’s modulus), exhibits a drift rate two to three orders of magnitude lower than that of the sensors adopting conventional ionic conductors and enables steady and accurate control for robotic manipulation. Such drift-free ionotronic sensing potentializes highly accurate sensing in robotics and beyond.