FITNESS

FITNESS aims to develop thin, flexible smart skins able to provide a non-contact sense of “touch”. The underlying key technology is that of meta-surfaces, i.e. structured surfaces that have unusual properties at some frequencies. The approach combines a variety of fields: RF front-end circuits, chemistry and polymer materials, flexible substrates, silicon integration, phased array antennas, metamaterials, numerical modelling, thermal management and communication systems.

The first demonstrator will be realised in the field of robotics, while later applications are envisaged in the medical area. One of the main societal outputs will be a more harmonious collaboration between robots and humans through the constant probing of their respective near-field environments.