Engineers at Glasgow university have developed an ultra-sensitive electronic skin that learns from the sensations it experiences. A robotic hand covered with the new e-skin recoiled from what it recognised as “painful” stimuli.
“This research could be the basis for a more advanced electronic skin which enables robots capable of exploring and interacting with the world in new ways — or building prosthetic limbs which are capable of near-human levels of touch sensitivity,” said Fengyuan Liu, co-author of a paper describing the project in the journal Science Robotics.
The team was inspired by the human peripheral nervous system, which processes sensory data locally at the point of contact before sending only essential information to the brain. That enables the brain to respond very fast to sensations such as pain, heat or cold.