Pressure Sensitive E-Skin Revolutionizes Robotics

Scientists working at UC Berkeley have announce the discovery and fabrication of a new type of pressure sensitive material, called e-skin, that can be used to simulate real human skin. The material will be used on robots to give them similar touch sensibility that humans have and will ultimately lead to being used as a skin replacement on humans.

The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation , Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and additional funding from other sources. Kuniharu Takei headed the team that developed this new e-skin with other team members consisting of Ron Fearing, Toshitake Takahashi, John Ho, Hyunhyub Ko, Paul Leu, and Andrew Gillies.

This new e-skin is made possible by using semiconductor nano-wires that give the robots the touch and feel necessary to do tasks similar in nature to human beings. This inorganic material allows robots to be able to manipulate objects on a finer level than was possible in the past and is what robotic engineers have been waiting for to push robotics to the next level.

In the past robotic engineers had to rely on organic methods for skin simulation. Organic skin doesn't have the same ability to hook up to control electronics and is many times inferior to the new electronically able replacement. The new e-skin uses a very low voltage level, less than 5 volts, to achieve the objective and this is a huge plus when you consider battery usage on mobile robots.

The scientists discovered a unique way of adding the nano-wires to fabric in a uniform manner allowing easy manufacturing of the new technology. The nano-wires are made using silicon and germanium elements grown on a drum and can be rolled into many different materials such as glass, paper, or plastic but they use a special polyimide film for the e-skin used for robots. The e-skin has been shown to last at least 2,000 bends and is capable of sensing pressure from 0 to 15 kilopascals which is close enough to human touch to be useful for many tasks humans now perform.

This new e-skin technology is a discovery that won't stop here. The scientists envision the ability to fabricate the tech into many other forms. It is easy to see this new skin lead into ways for humans to wear the electronic skin and eventually be able to interface into computer programs that will lead to a more realistic virtual reality experience. If scientists find a way to interface into the human brain and use it as a real skin replacement for humans we will be a step closer to becoming similar to the Borg on Star Trek. Using material technology to replace human parts is nothing new but we may soon have to decide if what we see is a human or a machine.

Sarah Yang, "Engineers make artificial skin out of nanowires." .berkeley.edu