Ultrahigh performance and multifunctional flexible biomimetic electronic whiskers for intelligent perception

The humanoid robots that can operate in complex and extreme environments are capable of detecting and discerning various stimuli by the sensors mimicking the human skin sensory system. Herein, we report a flexible biomimetic electronic whisker that greatly expands the diversity of perception in an extremely simple design, including proximity, temperature, pressure, wind, and vibration, which can also discriminate these perception signals. Notably, the biomimetic whisker fabricated using scalable processes possesses a wide-range measurements of bimodal temperature (-189 o C to 150 o C for object, -85 o C to 60 o C for surroundings) and wind speed (1 m s -1 to 20.4 m s -1 ), with bending stability (250000 cycles), the response of slight pressure (0.07 mN), and the sense of vibration (1000 Hz). In the frame of machine learning, we finally exploit the sensor to demonstrate the outstanding potential in robotics and human-machine interfaces.