Stretchy Wearable Patch Allows Two-Way Communication With Robots
Engineers at the University of Houston are trying to make the melding of humans and machines a little easier on the humans. They’ve developed an easy-to-manufacture flexible electronics patch that, when attached to a human, translates the person’s motion and other commands to a robot and receives temperature feedback from the robot.
Led by University of Houston assistant professor Cunjiang Yu, the team developed transistors, RRAM memory cells, strain sensors, UV-light detectors, temperature sensors, and heaters all using the same set of materials in a low-temperature manufacturing process. They integrated the different devices into a 4-micrometer-thick adhesive plastic patch.
A paper describing the Houston researchers’ work appears this week in Science Advances .