Flexible Sensors Make Robot Skin

Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent years, lots of efforts have been made to give robots the ability to hear and see. But what about the sense of touch? Unlike us, robots don't have sensitive skin. But this is about to change. By using organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created an artificial skin which will give robots the sense of touch. The prototype has a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter, far from the 1,500 of our fingertips. When this density increases and when the problem of the reliability of this kind of transistors is solved, the researchers say this artificial skin will also be used for car seats or gym carpets. Expect to see them in four or five years. More details and a picture of a robotic hand using organic transistors as pressure sensors."

Comments

Roland Piquepaille writes nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

he just plaigarises other peoples content and sells it on his blog

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Complaining Robots

[A Boy and His Blob]

Oh great, one more thing for Marvin to complain about.

I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed, and my leg hurts too.

Re:Why this is not going to help much + a better w

[Animats]

The problem is not that you can't do it. It's that the market is so dinky that tooling up to do it isn't worth it.

It should be feasible to make integrated silicon strain gauge/amplifier/interface chips, embed them in a flexible printed circuit, and laminate them into a skin-like laminate with appropriate tough, soft, and hard layers. But the processes involved are all high-volume ones - it's hard to do this economically in small volume. And there's no market for a process that turns out big rolls of this stuff.

There's a lot of stuff in robotics that's like that. Linear motors and laser scanners both cost about 20x what they should. because the volume is tiny. Even basic servomotos and servo amps cost 5x as much as they should, based on parts cost.

It's getting better, though. More and more parts needed in robotics are becoming off the shelf. I run a DARPA Grand Challenge team, and over the last year, many of the components you need for that have become far more available.

Re:God solved this problem with hair

[uglyduckling]

Utter rubbish.

I'm a med student - I had to respond to this one. There are 6 types of tactile receptors, of which nerve endings attached to hairs are one. Hairs provide basic information about movement - the wind or your clothes moving past your skin etc.

The tips of your fingers are hairless. That's obvious - look at them under a magnifying glass or microscope if you have one. Fine touch sensation is provided by Tactile Discs and Tactile Corpuscles located in the ("live") skin of the dermis. The skin is not made exclusively of "dead" cells, but of many layers, and the ("dead") epidermis at the surface is quite capable of transmitting movement down to these cells.

You can check all of this out if you want.

People have hair on their heads mainly for insulation (get a crew cut in the middle of winter if you want to prove this!) although I agree that hair on the head has a limited use in avoiding collisions. I suspect that subjective loss of sensation in the face after shaving is due to the trauma of having run a blade over your skin, and the stinging sensation from the damage to hair follicles.