Saturday, March 5, 2011

Sensitive E-skin for Robots

That day is not so far when robots will be touchy and feely like humans. Robots that made from metal in human size can do multiple works. These robots look same as human and can do different kind of work, these robots will have now skin that identify sensitivity of skins.

Because of this skin, now modern robots will look exactly like human and while touching them they will make us to feel same sensitivity and softness just like human being. Researchers of California University had tried to make sensitive fingers of robot that can pick up the delicate drinking glass carefully.

They also made e-skin for such robots from in organic materials. For this they used germanium/silicon nanowires on a cylindrical drum, which was then rolled onto a sticky substrate. This e-skin is one kind of chip which is slimmer like rubber and it make robot to feel touch. This robot can carry a child and play with him without any harassment.

The substrate used was a polyimide film, but the technique could be used with a variety of materials, including other plastics, paper or glass, the team said. The nanowires were deposited by the drum onto the substrate in an orderly fashion, and then the substrate was processed into thin, flexible sheets.

For the e-skin, the engineers printed the nanowires onto an 18-by-19 pixel square matrix measuring 7 centimeters on each side. Each pixel contained a transistor made up of hundreds of semiconductor nanowires. Nanowire transistors were then integrated with a pressure sensitive rubber on top to provide the sensing functionality.

The matrix required less than 5 volts of power to operate and maintained its robustness after being subjected to more than 2,000 bending cycles.

The e-skin developed by the team can detect pressure from 1 to 15 kilopascals. That's about the amount of pressure used to complete daily activities like typing on a keyboard or holding an object, the researchers said.

Such sensitivity is necessary to create a human prosthetic hand that can distinguish between the force necessary to, say, hold an egg without cracking it and the force necessary to lift a heavy pot without dropping it.