Multimodal Iontronic Tactile Sensor with Intelligent Decoupling Method

The iontronic tactile sensor is a promising device for the robot to perceive temperature and pressure information. However, there was no suitable method to decouple the multimodal information from readout signals, due to complicated impedance response features. Hence, we fabricated a film as a sensing layer to make a tactile sensor. Then, the impedance response features, stimulated by temperature and pressure, were analyzed. After that, a machine learning method was used to decouple the readout signals, where three neural networks were compared. Furthermore, we conducted a primitive hot water weighting experiment to demonstrate the decoupling performance. This study provided a method to get temperature and pressure information from a single iontronic sensing layer, which has potential benefits in various scenarios such as human-robot interaction and health care.