Scientists at the National University of Singapore have created a revolutionary synthetic skin that is a smart skin type. This skin is made up of a hundred small sensors and can create a tactile sensation. This new, cutting-edge skin has been created to make it less difficult for robots to recognize elements and textures, but designers expect to apply it to prosthetics, which users will feel.
Smart skin measures approximately 1 square cm and has a hundred small sensors that will identify elements and textures, then transmit one and both small sensations to the AI (artificial intelligence) brain that will interpret a sensation and expand the sense of touch. According to foreign media, one of the leading researchers, assistant professor Benjamin Tee, said that the concept of intelligent skin was fostered through the film “Star Wars”, where a character “Luke Skywalker” loses his hand and ends with a robot hand. is able to feel the touch again.
“We are very happy with those results. They demonstrate that a neuromorphic formula is a promising piece of the puzzle for mixing multiple sensors to improve robot perception. This is a step towards building reliable and energy-efficient robots capable of reacting temporarily and in unforeseen situations,” assistant professor Harold Soh said, according to the report published on the news website of the National University of Singapore.
This faux fur is called asynchronous coded electronic skin (ACES). According to the researchers, this intelligent skin can process data “1000 times faster than the human sensory nervous system.” In order to test the talents of this skin, the researchers used it to read Braille and downloaded 92% accuracy when reading and detecting letters in Braille.
“Scalability is a critical focus because giant pieces of high-performance electronic masks are needed to cover the giant surfaces of robots and prosthetics. ACES can be seamlessly related to any type of sensor skin layers, for example, those designed to trip over temperature and humidity, to create a high-performance ACES-compatible electronic skin with an exceptional sense of touch that can be used for a wide variety of applications,” assistant professor Benjamin Tee said according to the report.