Flexible Tactile Sensor Array: Trends and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past decades, research on flexible tactile sensor arrays has attracted increasing interest in various fields of application, including robotics, medical devices, haptic devices and wearables, extended reality, and IoT, just to name a few. Given the growing demand for increasingly complex and specific tasks such as object shape identification, materials properties estimation, surface texture recognition, and grasp stability detection, it became necessary to use increasingly advanced manufacturing methods and materials to develop touch sensors with certain characteristics such as high resolution, mechanical flexibility and adaptability, and implementation of multimodal and multifunctional sensing. Moreover, despite the market presence of some types of flexible tactile sensor arrays, their uptake in commercial applications is still extremely low compared to other sensing modalities. For this reason, we can consider the current flexible tactile sensor array to be still in its infancy.

Going beyond the state of the art, tactile sensor arrays still face enormous challenges considering their practical applications, in terms of:

• Performance: improving performance in terms of sensitivity, resolution, hysteresis, repeatability, multimodality, and cross-talk;
• Hardware: improving physical arrangement, modularity, and robustness for implementation in different types of applications, from autonomous robotics to tele-operated systems, from industrial to medical use;
• Economic sustainability: by optimizing the fabrication process and reducing the power consumption;
• Data processing: taking advantage of the recent impact of AI hardware and software (edge computing, quantum computing, parallel computing (neuromorphic), FPGA) to deeply explore and decode the information embedded in the tactile acquisition signals.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research topics may include (but are not limited to) the following: multimodal and multidimensional tactile sensing; novel structural and sensing materials; advanced manufacturing technologies; flexible, conformable, and stretchable tactile sensors and arrays; tactile data processing and interpretation tactile sensing in industrial robots, humanoids and tele-operated systems; tactile sensing in haptic devices and wearable devices and IoT; and tactile sensing in prosthetics and medical devices.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Jorge Cabral
Dr. Edoardo Sotgiu
Guest Editors

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• multimodal and multidimensional tactile sensing
• structural and sensing materials
• advanced manufacturing technologies
• flexible tactile sensors arrays
• stretchable tactile sensors arrays
• tactile data processing
• tactile sensing in industrial robots//humanoids
• tactile sensing in tele-operated systems/ prosthetics/medical devices
• tactile sensing in haptic devices/wearable devices/IoT