The rapid rise of the Internet of things (IoT) have brought the progress of electronic skin (e-skin). E-skin is used to imitate or even surpass the functions of human skin. Thermoregulating is one of the crucial functions of human skin, it is significant to develop a universal way to realize e-skin thermoregulating. Here, inspired by the sweat gland structure in human skin, we report a simple method for achieving dynamic thermoregulating, attributing to the temperature of microencapsulated paraffin remains unchanged when phase change occurs. Combining with the principle of triboelectric nanogenerator, a deep learning model is employed to recognize the output signals of handwriting different letters on ME-skin, and the recognition accuracy reaches 98.13%. Finally, real-time recognition and display of handwritings are successfully implemented by the ME-skin, which provides a general solution for thermoregulating e-skin and application direction for e-skin in the field of IoT.

The gearbox is one of the key components in wind turbines. Gearbox fault signals are usually nonstationary and highly contaminated with noise. The presence of amplitude-modulated and frequency-modulated (AM-FM) characteristics compound the difficulty of precise fault diagnosis of wind turbines, therefore, it is crucial to develop an effective fault diagnosis method for such equipment. This paper presents an improved diagnosis method for wind turbines via the combination of synchrosqueezing transform and local mean decomposition. Compared to the conventional time-frequency analysis techniques, the improved method which is performed in non-real-time can effectively reduce the noise pollution of the signals and preserve the signal characteristics, and hence is suitable for the analysis of nonstationary signals with high noise. This method is further validated by simulated signals and practical vibration data measured from a 1.5 MW wind turbine. The results confirm that the proposed method can simultaneously control the noise and increase the accuracy of time-frequency representation.

Soft pneumatic grippers can grasp soft or irregularly shaped objects, indicating potential applications in industry, agriculture, and healthcare. However, soft grippers rarely carry heavy and dense objects due to the intrinsic low modulus of soft materials in nature. This paper designed a soft robotic gripper with rigid supports to enhance lifting force by 150 ± 20% in comparison with that of the same gripper without supports, which successfully lifted a metallic wrench (672 g). The soft gripper also achieves excellent adaptivity for irregularly shaped objects. The design, fabrication, and performance of soft grippers with rigid supports are discussed in this paper.