A Biomimetic Optical Skin for Multimodal Tactile Perception Based on Optical Microfiber Coupler Neuron

Tactile sensation is one of the critical ways humans perceive the world and is fundamental for the interaction with the surroundings. The development of haptic sensors can enable us to extend and transcend the human sense of touch to perceive the world more subtly. Inspired by the ingenious biological structure and the tactile sensing mechanism of the finger skin, we propose a biomimetic optical skin (BOS) based on optical microfiber coupler neuron (OMCN) in this paper, which realizes the multimodal tactile perception for the first time. Benefiting from the combination of the biomimetic structure that mimics the characteristics of the skin and the OMCN imitates the neuron which has the capability of multi-parameter sensing with high sensitivity, the sensing versatility of BOS is experimentally proven in that it can sensitively detect the temperature, contact force, and vibration, as well as the recognition of the hardness and roughness of the objects through the tactile-sensing manner of the human-like behavior. Besides, the excellent repeatability and stability of the BOS are investigated, which lays the foundation for practical applications. The proposed BOS can achieve the digitization of tactile perception and provide a new solution to the evolution of human-machine interaction and advanced robots.