{"id":42206,"date":"2024-05-03T16:32:17","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T16:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/03\/stretchable-e-skin-could-give-robots-human-level-touch-sensitivity\/"},"modified":"2024-05-03T16:32:17","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T16:32:17","slug":"stretchable-e-skin-could-give-robots-human-level-touch-sensitivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/03\/stretchable-e-skin-could-give-robots-human-level-touch-sensitivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Stretchable e-skin could give robots human-level touch sensitivity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Stretchable<\/div>


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A first-ever stretchy electronic skin could equip robots and other devices with the same softness and touch sensitivity as human skin, opening up new possibilities to perform tasks that require a great deal of precision and control of force.<\/p>\n

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The new stretchable e-skin, developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, solves a major bottleneck in the emerging technology. Existing e-skin technology loses sensing accuracy as the material stretches, but that is not the case with this new version.<\/p>\n

“Much like human skin has to stretch and bend to accommodate our movements, so too does e-skin,” said Nanshu Lu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics who led the project. “No matter how much our e-skin stretches, the pressure response doesn’t change, and that is a significant achievement.”<\/p>\n

The new research was published today in Matter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lu envisions the stretchable e-skin as a critical component to a robot hand capable of the same level of softness and sensitivity in touch as a human hand. This could be applied to medical care, where robots could check a patient’s pulse, wipe the body or massage a body part.<\/p>\n

Why is a robot nurse or physical therapist necessary? Around the world, millions of people are aging and in need of care, more than the global medical system can provide.<\/p>\n

“In the future, if we have more elderly than available caregivers, it’s going to be a crisis worldwide,” Lu said. “We need to find new ways to take care of people efficiently and also gently, and robots are an important piece of that puzzle.”<\/p>\n

Beyond medicine, human-caring robots could be deployed in disasters. They could search for injured and trapped people in an earthquake or a collapsed building, for example, and apply on-the-spot care, such as administering CPR.<\/p>\n

E-skin technology senses pressure from contact, letting the attached machine know how much force to use to, for example, grab a cup or touch a person. But, when conventional e-skin is stretched, it also senses that deformation. That reading creates additional noise that skews the sensors’ ability to sense the pressure. That could lead to a robot using too much force to grab something.<\/p>\n

In demonstrations, the stretchability allowed the researchers to create inflatable probes and grippers that could change shape to perform a variety of sensitive, touch-based tasks. The inflated skin-wrapped probe was used on human subjects to capture their pulse and pulse waves accurately. The deflated grippers can conformably hold on to a tumbler without dropping it, even when a coin is dropped inside. The device also pressed on a crispy taco shell without breaking it.<\/p>\n

The key to this discovery is an innovative hybrid response pressure sensor that Lu and collaborators have been working on for years. While conventional e-skins are either capacitive or resistive, the hybrid response e-skin employs both responses to pressure. Perfecting these sensors, and combining them with stretchable insulating and electrode materials, enabled this e-skin innovation.<\/p>\n

Lu — who is also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Texas Materials Institute — and her team are now working toward the potential applications. They are collaborating with Roberto Martin-Martin, assistant professor at the College of Natural Sciences’ Computer Science Department to build a robotic arm equipped with the e-skin. The researchers and UT have filed a provisional patent application for the e-skin technology, and Lu is open to collaborating with robotics companies to bring it to market.<\/p>\n

Other authors on the paper are Kyoung-Ho Ha and Sangjun Kim of the Walker Department of Engineering; Zhengjie Li, Heeyong Huh and Zheliang Wang of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics; and Hongyang Shi, Charles Block and Sarnab Bhattacharya of the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ha is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University, and Block is now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Computer Science.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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A first-ever stretchy electronic skin could equip robots and other devices with the same softness and touch sensitivity as human skin, opening up new possibilities to perform tasks that require a great deal of precision and control of force. The new stretchable e-skin, developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, solves a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/images\/scidaily-icon.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[43756,43758,2739,43759,12640,23247,43757,5720],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42208,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42206\/revisions\/42208"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}