Technology Licensing

Smart E-Skin

QUOTE No: TEC1104397

Smart E-Skin

New intrinsically stretchable electronic skin (“e-skin”) based proprioception system capable of providing accurate, high-resolution, real-time and full-geometry characterisation of a soft object’s shape and position.

At a glance

This technology allows the determination of a soft object’s movement, action, location and touch area, enabling the precise control, operability, and practical implementation of soft robots and other soft systems.

Application

  • Surgical soft robotic systems and biomedical applications
  • VR-AR and wearable technologies
  • Soft robotics control systems

Development status

Prototype demonstrator and results

IP Status

Patented technology

Commercial offering

  • Commercial licensing opportunity
  • Investment and spin-out opportunity.

Opportunity

Soft devices, and in particular soft robots, offer ground-breaking approaches to address technological challenges for which conventional rigid systems are simply unfit. These include surgical robotics, compliant prostheses, industrial processes and wearable technologies.

Soft systems offer intrinsically safer and more life-like interactions, however, their conformable structure also makes their characterisation difficult and limits the determination of an object’s movement, action, location and the sense of environment (so-called 3-dimensional perception) which is essential for controllability and operability required for the practical implementation of such innovations.

To overcome this, University of Edinburgh researchers have developed a new 3D-perception system that enables real-time, high-accuracy three-dimensional, full-geometry shape reconstruction and tactile sensing suitable for use with soft robots and other soft systems.

Technology

The Edinburgh technology is underpinned by a new capacitive ‘e-skin’ design in combination with an innovative deep-learning methodology. Our solution provides real-time (30 fps), high accuracy (mm-scale error), and full-geometry shape reconstruction of dense point clouds of 3D-geometries under complex multimodal deformations (i.e. bending, twisting, elongation and their combinations). The e-skin can also provide touch recognition from the e-skin signals. This represents a major advancement over existing approaches for soft robot perception that is limited to sparse geometrical inference under one or two prescribed types of deformations or only tactile sensing.

The Edinburgh e-skin technology is intrinsically stretchable, and scalable and can be deployed either as an integral component of a product or as an external layer applied to the surface of the object. With a rapid training pipeline which is agnostic of the soft object’s shape, size and geometry, the technology can be readily deployed with any soft device where 3D-perception is desirable.

Benefits

  • High-resolution full-geometry proprioception
  • Intrinsically stretchable soft sensor material
  • Extra tactile sensing capability
  • Real-time performance
  • Training pipeline agnostic of objects' shape, geometry and size

Publication

Yang, Y. et al. Stretchable e-skin and transformer enable high-resolution morphological reconstruction for soft robots. Nat Mach Intell 5, 261–272 (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00622-8

Interested in learning more?

Speak to our expert

Kambiz Kalantari

Kambiz Kalantari

Senior Technology Transfer Manager