Someya Takao, Sekitani Tsuyoshi, Iba Shingo, Kato Yusaku, Kawaguchi Hiroshi, Sakurai Takayasu
Quantum-Phase Electronics Center, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Jul 6;101(27):9966-70. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0401918101. Epub 2004 Jun 28.
It is now widely accepted that skin sensitivity will be very important for future robots used by humans in daily life for housekeeping and entertainment purposes. Despite this fact, relatively little progress has been made in the field of pressure recognition compared to the areas of sight and voice recognition, mainly because good artificial "electronic skin" with a large area and mechanical flexibility is not yet available. The fabrication of a sensitive skin consisting of thousands of pressure sensors would require a flexible switching matrix that cannot be realized with present silicon-based electronics. Organic field-effect transistors can substitute for such conventional electronics because organic circuits are inherently flexible and potentially ultralow in cost even for a large area. Thus, integration of organic transistors and rubber pressure sensors, both of which can be produced by low-cost processing technology such as large-area printing technology, will provide an ideal solution to realize a practical artificial skin, whose feasibility has been demonstrated in this paper. Pressure images have been taken by flexible active matrix drivers with organic transistors whose mobility reaches as high as 1.4 cm(2)/V.s. The device is electrically functional even when it is wrapped around a cylindrical bar with a 2-mm radius.
现在人们普遍认为，对于未来供人类在日常生活中用于家务和娱乐目的的机器人而言，皮肤敏感度将非常重要。尽管如此，与视觉和语音识别领域相比，压力识别领域的进展相对较小，主要是因为目前还没有具备大面积和机械柔韧性的优质人造“电子皮肤”。制造由数千个压力传感器组成的敏感皮肤需要一个灵活的开关矩阵，而这是目前基于硅的电子技术无法实现的。有机场效应晶体管可以替代此类传统电子器件，因为有机电路本质上具有柔韧性，即使对于大面积而言成本也可能极低。因此，将有机晶体管和橡胶压力传感器集成在一起，这两者都可以通过诸如大面积印刷技术等低成本加工技术来生产，将为实现实用的人造皮肤提供理想的解决方案，本文已证明了其可行性。通过具有迁移率高达1.4 cm²/V·s的有机晶体管的柔性有源矩阵驱动器获取了压力图像。该器件即使缠绕在半径为2毫米的圆柱形棒上仍能保持电功能。
