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Japanese Researchers Develop Sensor Skin
ScentCone writes "A University of Tokyo team has developed a flexible, laminated network of pressure and temperature sensors suitable for jobs such as robot fingers. Circuits as pressure sensors, and semiconductors as temperature sensors are not new, but the thin, networked laminate of the two is novel."
Robotic musceles are solved? Thats new to me.
They are far, far away from being "solved". Atrificial muscels (made of fibers) are energy inefficient and bulky. DC-Motors are bulky and heavy, yet better in efficiancy still not good enough.
Take forexample a human Hand: What do you think, how many muscles (=motors) do we have? And thats only the motors ... strings, wires, powersupply adds.
And for the article: Its nice that they manufacture such a skin ... but how many degrees of freedom is it able to measure? 1 is definitly to few. How are the signals read? The have to be amplified a lot, so how many wires are needed? Wehere is the amplification done? Just imagine ous small finger -- is there inside enoug room for the bearing structure plus amplification-electronics plus wires?
NOT the skin itself is the problem, but to integrate it successfully in a human-sized, human-capable robotic hand.
Its not just about making them more "appealing" to the public.
This new "fabric" laminates the pressure and temperature sensing network together, so that both properties can be detected simultaneously, using carbon based circuits and semi-conductors, which is inexpensive to reproduce
This would allow the scientists to measure more easily (if not more accurately), the effects a certain task would have were it performed by a human, the side effects certain working conditions may have (kind of prevention before cure), and in future they could add more sensors on these layers to measure other aspects (for example, radioactivity)..
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I am a minority in Japan, and find my current working conditions more than accommodating. Things change. We're not at war anymore. We haven't been for almost 50 years. How old are you, that you can remember all that?
The Chinese have also done horrendous things in their 5,000-year history (to pretty much everybody, and the only thing that stopped them from doing it to Japan was a bit of water and bad weather.) Speaking of Korea, do you also remember this? For sheer nastiness, the only thing Koreans have to fear is themselves.
War is ugly, but it is not unique to Japan. Nor is hatred fashionable, just because it seems to be fashionable right now to hate the Japanese. How can you pretend to be better than somebody when you can't even forgive them for something that happened before you were even born?
I come from America, and we've committed our share of war atrocities (a lot of them against the Japanese, and that's not counting the American ones.) Luckily, we're also powerful and usually on the winning side, so we get to help out with how the history books are written. It works out well for the whole PR campaign.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
I think that, if nothing else, a very realistic robot will be a good test to see if the uncanny valley actually exists.