Robotic Sense of Touch

Aryabhata writes "As per a BBC article, US scientists have created a device that could one day pave the way for robotic hands mimicking human touch. The research team from University of Nebraska in Lincoln hopes to apply this to aid surgery by allowing surgeons to feel the tissue they are operating on. This could help surgeons in distinguishing cancerous or abnormal tissue etc. To demonstrate the device the scientists tried the instrument on a one cent coin and the sensor revealed the wrinkles in President Lincoln's clothing and the letters TY in liberty."

Comments

Not for robots, really

[Anonymous Coward]

This is more of a remote control application of sensors. It lets you feel through the robotic hands.

In other words, it won't do anything for a sexbot, but the implications for the phone sex industry are profound!

I'd be more interested in the autonomous robotics

[RsG]

I get why this would be useful for telesurgery. But does anyone else thing this would be damn useful for robots more generally?

AI is the single largest problem with making robots that act autonomously, but there are other issues as well, and sensory data is one of them. Humans, and other animals, depend on a variety of senses to interact with our environment - ranging from sonar to sight to smell (depending on species). An individual is severly limited with one of their senses lost/reduced.

We could build a robot with sight easily - camera technology is getting better and better. Ditto sound recording, and even interpretation (voice recognition for example has come a long way). Gyroscopes can be used to give a sense of balance. It wouldn't be that difficult to add sonar or radar to that list, and smell we can probably skip for most applications. But touch is too useful not to have. For any device that moves independantly, being able to feel where it's putting its various body parts is potentially vital.

How important is our sense of touch? Hands are useless without feedback as to where we're putting them. Imagine the advantages for a robot that can feel different surfaces (and determine what they're made of, how sturdy they are, etc). I suspect a fair number of problems with pathfinding could be solved by giving the robot instructions as to what surfaces will and won't support it's weight. Telling a vehicle sized robot to stick to the asphalt would be helpful, especially when you consider the alternatives. It'd be nice to be able to tell a bot meant for cleaning not to throw away money, or to differentiate between recycleable materials and regular garbage, or to avoid scrubbing the carpet with tile cleaner...

Of course I'm probably getting ahead of the technology here - this sort of application won't exist for a long time yet. But hey, a geek can dream.

Forgetting something?

[Ethan Allison]

What about prosthetics that could actually feel? If I lost an arm or a leg or something, I'd pay top dollar not to lose my sense of touch.

Re:Forgetting something?

[RsG]

You'd also need the techology to tie the prosthetic limb into your nervous system. That might actually be the harder part.

OTOH, if you could tie into your peripheral nervous system, you'd have a prosthetic that not only had a sense of touch, but that could be controlled like a limb as well. The parts of your brain are already there to move it, so as long as you were born with the limb in question, you could probably train a prosthetic easily enough.

Re:Forgetting something?

[Meltir]

As i understand it - thats a bigger challenge.
TFA speaks only about touch->image conversion, and i doubt they have anything that can actually mimic any given texture under the surgeons hand.
The prosthetics we have now (if you have the cash) are able to react to nerves to some extent - forcing your arm to move, or grab an object.
But i think that making a interface that actually lets you feel what the computer is telling you is a different story.
And im talking tens of years of development.
We are getting into the neuromancer plot here - what if a machine like that got compromised and told you your arm was on fire ?
And what if it was hooked up directly into your spine (you had some near fatal injury and was paralized from the waste down) and it managed to convince you that you were .... erm - having a really bad time ?

Applications

[D H NG]

This might have some use to amputees. I heard a while ago that they were developing prosthetics with a sense of touch, but all they could do was distinguish between hot and cold.