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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."
I have been known to make a few anti-Roland posts in the past. When I first started paying attention to Roland's posts, I couldn't understand why many people hated him, either. But, now, I understand why. On one hand, Maybe part of it is overexposure. However, I think more of it has to do with his neverending spam and questionable approach to copyright law.
If you look here, you will see the T's & C's for using information from the source of Roland's story. If you read the fine print, you will see a sentence that reads "Use of this material for commercial purposes without explicit, written permission from Technology Research News, LLC is strictly prohibited".
Roland's blog is purely a commercial enterprise. He uses the ads on his blog to collect money. By copying and pasting entire paragraphs from the Technology Research News article, he is breaking the copyright.
Of course, maybe he does have 'explicit written permission'. But I doubt it. Why do I say this? Look at how he writes the article. Where is isn't copying and pasting, he is purely summarizing what was originally written by anybody else. Now, look at this link. Look at how he writes. No new information. he just collects information from dozens of web sites and either plagiarizes those sites or points to them through his blog. He must be collecting dozens of RSS feeds and picking and choosing what he thinks are the best.
Even worse, some of his posts are nothing but advertisements for products.
Now, let us say Roland DOES have legal explicit permission from all of those sites to copy and paste articles for his personal profit. I could live with that, IF he was adding additional insight into technology. Unfortunately, he isn't. His blog adds nothing to society.
No insight. No thoughts on where technology is heading. No review of how technology has come this far. He is just parroting what somebody else has written. The only logical explanation for him even having a web log is for the hope that you will be dumb enough to click one of his revenue-generating ads.
much Star Trek. At best you mean tactile feedback. Touch is something you might require, say.. sentience to appreciate and we aren't there quite yet.
Quack, quack.
*ahem* Now that's science!
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?