Zhenan Bao wants to give robots the sense of touch. The Stanford University professor is among a contingent of materials scientists, chemists, and engineers who have been working to develop stretchable electronic materials that could serve as artificial skin for robotics (see Physics Today, October 2008, page 18). Such materials could benefit people too, as medical sensors that can be worn like temporary tattoos or as implantable devices that could, say, monitor an internal organ without inhibiting its function.
Now Bao and her coworkers have reported their biggest advance yet in the pursuit of stretchable electronics: They’ve demonstrated a method for fabricating polymer films that are both stretchable and good semiconductors.1 Comments John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “I don’t think those two attributes had ever been found in the same material before.”
The Stanford group has already fashioned their films into stretchable transistors...
