Designing softness into robots holds great potential for augmenting robotic compliance in dynamic, unstructured environments. However, despite the body's softness, existing models mostly carry inherent hardness in their driving parts, such as pressure-regulating components and rigid circuit boards. This compliance gap can frequently interfere with the robot motion and makes soft robotic design dependent on rigid assembly of each robot component. We present a skin-like electronic system that enables a class of wirelessly activated fully soft robots whose driving part can be softly, compactly, and reversibly assembled. The proposed system consists of two-part electronic skins (e-skins) that are designed to perform wireless communication of the robot control signal, namely, "wireless inter-skin communication," for untethered, reversible assembly of driving capability. The physical design of each e-skin features minimized inherent hardness in terms of thickness (<1 millimeter), weight (~0.8 gram), and fragmented circuit configuration. The developed e-skin pair can be softly integrated into separate soft body frames (robot and human), wirelessly interact with each other, and then activate and control the robot. The e-skin-integrated robotic design is highly compact and shows that the embedded e-skin can equally share the fine soft motions of the robot frame. Our results also highlight the effectiveness of the wireless interskin communication in providing universality for robotic actuation based on reversible assembly.

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Development of highly sensitive pressure sensors that function well even in bending environments and operate at ultralow voltage is desirable for wearable applications. Here, a highly sensitive and bendable capacitive pressure sensor with the ability to distinguish pressure and bending stimuli and a pressure-sensitive transistor (PST) that can be easily integrated into wearable sensor system due to ultralow voltage (as low as 1 V for stable signal detection) operation is demonstrated. By introducing surface treatment and bonding technique, all components of the pressure sensor are tightly bonded to each other, enabling high bending stability. The sensor shows high pressure sensitivity (9.9 kPa −1 ) and can detect pressure even in the bending state. Additional bending sensors enables to separately detect signals from the actual pressure and bending deformation. In order to implement low-power sensor circuitry, the PST is fabricated by integrating the pressure sensor and inkjet-printing single-walled carbon nanotube thin film transistor. Such low-voltage operation of the PST enables to demonstrate the stand-alone wearable user-interactive pulse monitoring system by using commercially available electronic devices. The strategy for bendable low-power sensor may enable realization of wearable sensing system and electronic skins with low power consumption in near future.

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