Put on a layer of intelligent electronic skin for robots, perhaps they can sense the environment like humans, helping humans explore unknown territories in more scenarios. On March 28, the reporter learned from Southeast University that the school team has recently developed a full-featured gel electronic skin that can sense environmental information such as temperature, pressure, humidity, and has tensile, self-healing, antibacterial and other characteristics. The relevant results were published online in the international academic journal "American Chemical Society Nanometer". "The so-called electronic skin refers to a special material that is as soft, weakly acidic, bacteriostatic, and self-healing as skin. When energized, it can also sense information such as temperature, pressure, and humidity in the environment." Duan Shengshun, Ph.D., School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Southeast University, the first author of the paper, explained to reporters while holding a thin and soft material with his hand. It looks like a rubber strip, but it is much softer than the rubber strip, and has the same delicate and moist feeling as the skin. "The biggest difficulty in the research of electronic skin has always been that we cannot find suitable composite materials to simultaneously achieve the physical and chemical properties and stimulation perception properties similar to human skin." Duan Shengshun explained that in this study, they developed this special electronic skin using silk as the basic material, and added some key preparations. "Silk is a kind of protein material that is very soft. We add calcium ions with water absorption properties, hydrogen ions with weak acidity, and two-dimensional nanomaterials that are sensitive to environmental stimuli to synthesize them. Duan Shengshun introduced that the shaped electronic skin can be repaired and degraded, with a certain degree of weak acid bacteriostasis, fire resistance, and can also sense environmental information such as pressures below 10 kPa, temperatures of - 20-80 degrees Celsius.". "Moreover, electronic skin has the ability to heal itself. If you get scratched, you don't need to glue it together. You can attach another piece of electronic skin to it like a bandage to complete skin transplantation," Duan Shengshun said. Electronic skin is a tactile sensor that is considered a key "neck locking" technology. Wu Jun, co author of the paper and associate dean of the School of Electronic Science and Engineering of Southeast University, introduced that currently, electronic skin research faces two major challenges: one is the urgent need to improve the stability of the performance of a single device, and the other is the need to integrate and couple multiple functions. "It is worth anticipating that the application prospect of electronic skin is broad." Wu Jun said that existing robots often rely on visual perception to perceive the environment and make decisions. If robots have strong tactile perception capabilities, they can perceive the environment even if they are blindfolded or in the dark. The environmental cognitive ability of robots combined with vision and touch will have great application value in complex work scenes. (Liao Xinshe)