Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects. Synthetic Skin Sensitive to the Lightest Touch. 14 September 2010—Today’s advanced robots and prosthetic arms can grab an egg or a plastic cup without crushing it, thanks to tactile sensors on the fingertips. But you wouldn’t say they’re sensitive enough to pat a baby to sleep. For that you’d need to cover the robot arm with pressure-sensitive synthetic skin that could sense a featherlight touch. Two research groups, one at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other at Stanford, have independently made advances toward such a sensitive system.
Their prototypes are as good as human skin at quickly detecting small amounts of pressure: Within 100 milliseconds, they can feel pressures ranging from 15 kilopascals to less than 1 kPa. (The gentlest touch you can feel is 1 kPa.) The research teams reported their results on the Web site of the journal Nature Materials on 12 September. The two designs have trade-offs in flexibility and pressure sensitivity. Prachi Patel is a contributing editor to IEEE Spectrum. High-Tech Robot Skin. High-Tech Robot Skin Goddard Technologist Proposes Sensitive Skin Covering for Robots The ballerina gracefully dances on a small stage. She is followed not by a male partner, but by a robotic arm manipulator that seems to sense her every move. For NASA Goddard technologist Vladimir Lumelsky, the performance captured on the videotape neatly shows the future of robotics. Image right: High-Tech Robot Skin: Goddard technologist Vladimir Lumelsky believes the future of robotics lies with the development of a high-tech, sensor-embedded covering that would be able to sense the environment, much like human skin.
New Laboratory Under Development Lumelsky, until recently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has begun setting up a laboratory at Goddard to develop a high-tech covering that would enable robots to sense their environment and react to it, much like humans respond when something or someone touches their skin. Touch Sensing Remains Key Use of Infrared Sensors Challenges Ahead. Princeton engineers make breakthrough in ultra-sensitive sensor technology.
Princeton researchers have invented an extremely sensitive sensor that opens up new ways to detect a wide range of substances, from tell-tale signs of cancer to hidden explosives. The sensor, which is the most sensitive of its kind to date, relies on a completely new architecture and fabrication technique developed by the Princeton researchers. The device boosts faint signals generated by the scattering of laser light from a material placed on it, allowing the identification of various substances based on the color of light they reflect. The sample could be as small as a single molecule. The technology is a major advance in a decades-long search to identify materials using Raman scattering, a phenomena discovered in the 1920s by an Indian physicist, Chandrasekhara Raman, where light reflecting off an object carries a signature of its molecular composition and structure. Micrograph of a sensor developed at Princeton for sensing Raman scattering. (Photo Credit: Stephen Y.
Chou) The Sentry Project.