Responsive Liquid‐Crystal Microlaser Arrays with Tactile Perception

Abstract

Flexible photonics has the potential to develop artificial skins with superior sensing capabilities. As an essential skin function, the tactile simulation is, however, still challenging due to the difficulty in combining high pressure sensitivity and resolution in sensor networks. Here, this work designs flexible artificial photonic skins for the vivid tactile perception based on responsive cholesteric liquid‐crystal (CLC) vertical‐cavity microlaser arrays. Controllable liquid‐crystal molecule arrangement is explored to synthesize the elastic CLC vertical microcavity lasers, which support a strong correlation between the laser output signals and the external pressures. Large‐scale integration of the CLC microlaser‐based mechanical sensors enables the spatially resolved detection of pressures. As a proof‐of‐concept demonstration of vivid tactile simulation, the flexible photonic chip consisting of a CLC microlaser array is used to identify the contact objects. These results present a significant advance in the construction of high‐performance flexible optical sensor networks, thus providing valuable guidance for the design of novel photonic skins.

Bending and Stretching‐Insensitive, Crosstalk‐Free, Flexible Pressure Sensor Arrays for Human‐Machine Interactions

“…The sensor presents notable advantages in terms of sensitivity, linearity, working range, stretchability, and bending/stretching insensitivity over previously reported pressure sensors (Table S1, Supporting Information). [42,44,46,47,[50][51][52] In addition to bending and stretching, the device can also maintain stable performance over twisting and arching (Figure 1c), due to minimized peak strain and stress concentration in the PI/Cu composite as evidenced by the finite element analysis (FEA) (Figure 1d; Figure S3 and Movie S1, Supporting Information). It is worth noting that during the bending condition of the array, the individual sensing units exhibit a much smaller bending curvature compared to the entire sheet (Figure S4, Supporting Information) due to the rigid-island property.…”