'Skin' Developed for Robots


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Thin skin will help robots 'feel'

Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch.

The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature.

These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.

The University of Tokyo team describe their work in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers explain how pressure-sensing and temperature-sensing networks can be laminated together, forming an artificial skin that can detect both properties simultaneously.

Takao Someya, lead author on the latest research, previously developed a form of artificial skin capable of sensing pressure.

But the ability to sense temperature as well allows the scientists to more closely imitate the functions of human skin.

Someya and his colleagues used electronic circuits as pressure sensors and semiconductors as temperature sensors. They embedded these sensors in a thin plastic film to create networks of sensors.

Organic materials

The transistors used in the circuits and the semiconductors both use "organic" materials based on chains of carbon atoms.

This makes them mechanically flexible and relatively inexpensive to fabricate.

"Both of those characteristics sound compelling. The material sounds like it could have lots of functions," Dr Douglas Weibel, of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University told the BBC News website.

"The materials they're using may not be completely novel but the integration appears to be something new."

The University of Tokyo scientists say their breakthrough has the potential to improve how robots will function in the real world.

And they add that there is no need to stop at simply imitating the functions of human skin.

"It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks," the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Future artificial skins could incorporate sensors not only for pressure and temperature, but also for light, humidity, strain or sound, they add.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4154366.stm

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This isn't a thread about cloning.

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Cloning is much more 'natural' than making robots look like humans and I don't agree with it either.

So Terminator series must or should be real after all? Is just a movie, people, just a movie!?! :unsure:

I simply don't understand, are we not good enough? We need robots to grow our children? What kind of people will they be? How long before robots will take the lead of the mankind? This is not good! :no:

In 2600 robokind will learn at history about mankind, just as we learn now about dinosaurs. :woot:

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Cloning is much more 'natural' than making robots look like humans and I don't agree with it either.

So Terminator series must or should be real after all? Is just a movie, people, just a movie!?!  :unsure:

I simply don't understand, are we not good enough? We need robots to grow our children? What kind of people will they be? How long before robots will take the lead of the mankind? This is not good!  :no:

In 2600 robokind will learn at history about mankind, just as we learn now about dinosaurs.  :woot:

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you've seen too many hollywood flicks :rolleyes:

i think that this skin thing seems cool

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this doesnt have to be for robots right, it can be for artificial limbs?

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silicons (every time we wonder 'are they natural?'), artificial hair (he looks like a doll), artificial skin (what we will say when we see this?), ...

What's next? artificial brain... wait a minute, it's already invented, the AI

We need artificial organs (or already they exists?) and we can make the first artificial humans :D

I understand you when say 'cool' but someone need to play this role and I'm that guy :D

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terminator-2.jpg

"I'm comprised of organic tissue over a metal exoskeleton"

It seems they're only doing it to gain the sensory feedback of skin, and not to make robots look like humans.

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Look at it from this point of view, this 'techno-skin' could one day help burn victims (or victims of similar ailments) to feel and touch again...

I was watching a really interesting program on Discovery months and months ago called Engineering The Impossible, which depicted the next generation of buildings, habitats and ecosystems being constructed solely by robotica. I think thats cool, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone, someday, probably sometime soon, creates a robot with a gun ;)

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cool another step has been taken toward actually useful robotics. once we can put all this stuff together we will be able to make proper robots that can collect garbage and the such like and soldiers of course we wont be sending real people to war once we have machines to do it for us :)

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