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."

Comments

Re:Key invent

[RealNecator]

Since robot muscles are solved, this seems to be the key feature for future robots.

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.

Re:Finally...

[manavendra]

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)..