
In our Youth Technology Program for kids our robotics stream has them building & programming robots. We spend a lot of time exploring the whole area of sensors. I use the 5-senses to lead these discusions. On of the senses is touch, and for these projects there are touch sensors that the kids can integrate into their robots and program to react to the environment around them. One of the challenges is that the touch sensor is often only good for a localized area on the robot. There are innovative ways that the kids increase this touch area, through the use of bumpers or cat-like whiskers that when bumped depress a touch sensor and send feed back to the robot. This works but again, the amount of area covered is always limited by the number of touch sensors you can put onto the robot.
That's why this development I just read about was particularily interesting. It builds on our own sense of touch vis-a-vis our skin. I haven't seen any robots that have sensitive skin ,but that all seems to be about to change. Through the use of organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created exactly that - a robotics skin.
The researchers' prototype is an eight-centimeter-square sheet containing a 32-by-32 array of organic sensors -- a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter. In contrast, humans have 1,500 pressure sensors per square centimeter in the fingertips, though far fewer in most other places.
Obviously this isn't as sensitive as human skin, but it clearly is an amazing breakthrough. The applications for this type of skin would be limitless and would greatly improve industrial and domestic robotics ability to sense their environment for such things that require sensitivity (ie. picking a person up....you wouldn't want a robot to apply the full pressure of its mechanisms and risk bruising a home care patient for instance). Reseachers estimate that the electronic skin could be ready for practical use in four to five years. To read the entire article pertaining to this you can click here.
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