Article Journal 7

This article is about developing an artificial, touch sensitive material that would function as an artificial skin. However there were practical obstacles to overcome in developing this material. Previously, developers in this field had experimented with organic materials. This was due to the fact that organic materials are flexible and therefore more practical. However there is a problem with using organic materials. While flexible, these materials are poor conductors of electricity, forcing any device made from these materials to run on high voltages. These made the skin materials impractical. On the other hand, non organic materials were found to be good conductors of electricity. Unfortunately, these materials are inflexible, breaking and cracking under pressure. This left engineers no materials to work efficiently with. This led UC Berkeley engineers to develop this new product. It is made from inorganic materials, and is therefore able to conduct electricity. However this new material is made form this wires of the inorganic material and has been found to be very flexible, creating a viable product to create a touch sensitive skin from.

Engineers Make Artificial Skin out of Nanowires Article

The effort put into developing this skin was time well spent. This is because the skin has multiple realistic applications. Firstly, this robotic skin could be applied to other robots themselves. One problem with robots is that unlike humans who can sense are react to pressure and weight, robots have only been developed to react to the fact that there is some form of contact being made. They cannot judge how much pressure they should exert. In his article, researcher Toshiharu Mukai also states, "the robot cannot hold an infant in its arms without tactile sensors. When we hold an infant, we will try to feel the position where the pressure is located and control our arms accordingly. In the same manner, when the robot tries to hold an infant, it should control its arms by feeding back the information obtained from the tactile sensors. Without tactile sensors, the robot may hold a person in its arms so strongly that it may cause harm to the person. However, existing tactile sensors for robots can detect only simple tactile senses such as "struck" or "touched," and the accuracy of signals from the sensors are insufficient to use for feedback signals." The robotic skin could change all of this and make robots much more applicable to real life. Secondly, the robotic skin could be applied to humans in the future. People are always looking for ways to improve prosthetic limbs. This skin could allow people who have lost limbs to regain some function in using a prosthetic limb that could sense objects and react to them by exerting a reasonable amount of pressure and holding them. The only drawback to the artificial skin is that there is currently no way to mass produce it, however it is stated that its production has the potential to be scaled up.

Developing sensors that give intelligence to robots