Ultra-thin graphene foam based flexible piezoresistive pressure sensors for robotics

Over recent years, robotics has made a drastic impact in a variety of different markets. Although robotics provides many advantages from, safer workspace to speed and efficiency there are several drawbacks. These all range from their lack of ability to execute functions and tasks easily performed by humans. This is mainly due to their lack of ability to implement touch and haptic feedback. In this work, we show the use and applicability of ultra-thin graphene foam (GRF), with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) embedded into and over the structure, as an active layer in piezoresistive based pressure sensors for use in robotic touch sensing applications. It has been demonstrated in this work that thin GRF/PDMS-GRF consisting of a few layers of graphene is able to present sensitivity to pressures within the range of 0 to >100 kPa. Although pressure sensitivities are not yet comparable to those of current work, it must be noted that the GRF used in this work is much thinner in comparison, consisting of only several layers of graphene.