Recently, a team led by Zhang Lei and Yang Jing from the School of Chemical Engineering at Tianjin University successfully developed a new type of electronic skin. This skin can achieve high stretchability, self-healing, and high sensitivity for robotic hands in the extreme cold environment of -78°C, which is of great significance for China's polar scientific research. The related achievements have been published in the prestigious international journal "Journal of the American Chemical Society".
Polar exploration is an important part of human scientific exploration: the Arctic and Antarctic are far from human living environments, preserving secrets of early life, Earth, and even the solar system; the polar regions are also important components of the Earth's natural and ecological systems, which can have profound impacts on environmental development. However, the low-temperature environment of the polar regions poses great risks to the safety of explorers. The development of polar robots is of great significance in reducing casualties among scientific research personnel and exploring unknown hazardous areas.
Illustration of New Cold-Resistant Electronic Skin Provided by Tianjin University
The "sensory ability" of robots will greatly impact the quality of polar exploration. The development of electronic skin that gives robots a "sense of touch" has become essential. The electronic skin developed by the team of Tian Zhanglei and Yang Jing has high stretchability, can be wrapped around the robot's palm, and can accurately sense pressure, identify object shapes, and specific symbols under extreme cold conditions of -78°C. Particularly noteworthy is that this electronic skin has self-repair and self-healing functions. After being damaged in extreme cold conditions, its transmission capability can fully recover, allowing the skin to adapt perfectly to polar extreme environmental scientific research tasks.
"As early as 2020, our team developed the 'all-weather self-healing electronic skin,' representing the academic frontier at that time," Yang Jing explained. "Today, our new generation of electronic skin has been comprehensively upgraded. Building on the self-healing function, it can now fully adapt to the extreme environment of -78°C. We look forward to this new achievement presenting broader application prospects in Chinese polar scientific expeditions and other research fields."
Related paper link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c00541
