An integration of soft materials, sensors and flexible electronics is bringing robotic “skin” closer...
Now new research is adding more abilities and complexities to bring this field closer to its ultimate goal: an electronic skin, or e-skin, with uses ranging from covering robots to sticking wearable devices onto humans.
These improvements allowed researchers to incorporate new sensors and electronics into a fully developed skin system, Dahiya says.
"We wanted to create a robotic skin that has the physical sensing capability-basically what people already do," Gao says.
To achieve this, the team developed an artificial intelligence program to enable a connection between two electronic skin patches-one on a robot and another on a human.
The skin printing process is scalable, so the researchers were able to print a fingertip-size patch for a robotic hand and a larger one for a human's forearm.
Dahiya used human skin as the inspiration for his electronic skin's data processing, described in two separate Science Robotics articles that were also published this month.
Dahiya points to a touch sensor his group developed that uses tiny transistors-devices that control the flow of electricity to and from other electronic components-to help robotic skin feel and learn.
The skin learns the robotic equivalent of pain, he adds, so it will not transmit the signal until it feels something "Painful."
In addition to remotely controlling robots or teaching them to adapt to their environments, electronic skins could have many other applications.
"We still don't have robots in people's homes." But with all the possible applications of electronic skin, he says it is crucial to have collaborations with parties outside the engineering field.