Recent progress in flexible tactile sensor systems: from design to application

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, human-machine interaction, and healthcare systems, flexible tactile sensors have huge market potentials and research needs, so that both fundamental research and application demonstrations are evolving rapidly to push the potential to reality. In this review, we briefly summarize the recent progress of the flexible tactile sensor system, including the common sensing mechanisms, the important performance evaluation parameters, the device design trend, and the main applications. Moreover, the current device design trend towards flexible tactile sensor systems is discussed, including novel structures for outstanding performance, sensor arrays for large-area information acquisition, multi-mode information acquisition, and integration of tactile sensors with transistors. Various emerging applications enabled with these sensors are also exemplified in this review to show the potentials of the tactile sensors. Finally, we also discuss the technical demands and the future perspectives of flexible tactile sensor systems.