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"Sensitive" Skin for Robots
lperdue writes "One of the big problems with making robots more in tune with their environment is the lack of a "skin" with many, many embedded sensors --like we have as humans. Now, New Scientist is reporting that electrical engineers Sigurd Wagner and Stephanie Lacour from Princeton University have developed g a prototype using corrugated gold foil in an elastic matrix that could do the job."
"Bite my corrugated gold foil in an elastic matrix ass"
Yet Another Web Site
He had the Midas touch,
but he touched it too much,
Hey Gold Member! Hey Gold Member!
The Borg Queen tried this on Data. But in the end, his loyalty to Starfleet was greater.
Only by instilling the concepts of loyalty and respect can we expect any good behavior from our robots.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
How long until we see a robot at the drug store pondering what kind of condoms to buy?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Does sounds way too expensive to be practical. But other than that quite impressive.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
I like to use the conductive, compressible
foam used for packing electronic parts.
This stuff is essentially free, and comes
in convenient sheets, suitable for skinning
over your manipulator.
It works like so: The resistance of the foam
changes when it is compressed, so you add
lots and lots of little wires, glued to the
foam with a conductive glue, and monitor
the resistance between pairs. This is a
crude pressure sensor. It's good enough
to modulate the grip energy of a tactile
robot for shaking hands with a human, or
picking up a drinking glass.
For more refined, quality-controlled results,
you would want something a bit more upscale.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
this feature was lobbied furiously for by the Determitologists of America. in a future controlled by robots, determatologists will need work.
A factor hampering progress, the pair say, is the sheer pliability of their strip-like connector devices, which are proving difficult to handle owing to the extreme flimsiness of their first prototypes.
have they considered that if the elastic is reasonably heat resistant, they can fix tears in the conductors by heating up the gold (gold has a low melting point, right?) when not fully stretched and then letting it cool back into a single strip?
it seems like this would make this type of skin pretty reasonably tough. if may break easily, but it can pretty much fix itself. just add some kind of heating mechanism to the robot.
Do you mean dermitologists, ie skin-doctors?
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Why was I programmed to feel pain!?!?
Feeling pain helps a being learn how to avoid damage to its body.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since when was this a "big problem"? First I've heard of it. If you think about it, your skin actually plays a pretty minor role in your interaction with the environment, with the obvious exception of your hands and fingers, and maybe at a gross scale for things like monitoring temperature, which could be easily performed by individual sensors.
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