With eggs in hand without breaking, engineers have developed a breakthrough "robot skin"

CTOnews.com, October 28 (Xinhua) the University of British Columbia and Honda researchers have successfully developed a new type of soft smart sensor with high sensitivity and stretchability, which can be widely used in the field of robots and prosthetics in the future.

After being applied to a robot or a prosthetic limb, this sensor can sense the touch of an object sensitively, thus allowing the robot to pick up soft objects.

The sensor feels soft, just like human skin, which helps to make human-computer interaction safer and more realistic.

Dr 米孜 Saquib Sarwar, author of the study, said: "our sensors can sense many types of forces, allowing prosthetics or robotic arms to respond flexibly and accurately to tactile stimuli. For example, the arm can hold a fragile object such as an egg or a glass of water without crushing or falling."

CTOnews.com Note: the sensor is mainly made of silicone rubber, a material used to make many skin effects in movies. The team's unique design allows it to bend and wrinkle like human skin.

"our sensors use weak electric fields to sense objects, even at a distance, like a touch screen," Dr. John Madden explained. "but unlike a touch screen, this sensor is soft and can detect forces entering and along its surface. This unique combination is the key to using this technology to come into contact with humans."

Address: 米孜 S. Sarwar, Ryusuke Ishizaki, Kieran Morton, Claire Preston, Tan Nguyen, Xu Fan, Bertille Dupont, Leanna Hogarth, Takahide Yoshiike, Ruixin Qiu, Yiting Wu, Shahriar Mirabbasi, John D. W. Madden. Touch, press and stroke: a soft capacitive sensor skin. Scientific Reports, 2023; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-43714-6