There are a plethora of research teams working to create fully functional artificial skin for robots, and even humans who are fitted with prostheses. While there have been many advancements, none of them have been able to to detect both heat and pressure sensitivity at the same time.
Until now.
A team of researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and Dong-A University has developed an artificial skin that can does possess this capability.
In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes how they created the skin, what they found in testing it and the other types of things it can sense.
According to the team’s research paper, published in the Journal Science Advances:
“Human skin can also detect and discriminate between static and dynamic mechanical stimuli. Within human skin, while the slowly adapting receptors (for example, Merkel and Ruffini corpuscles) respond to sustained touch and pressure on the skin, fast-adapting receptors (for example, Meissner and Pacinian corpuscles) respond to dynamic touch and vibration stimuli. In addition, human skin is known to have both piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties originating from the presence of polar keratin, elastin, and collagen fibers with unique orientations, which enable human skin to precisely perceive and differentiate mechanical and thermal stimuli.”
The team’s electronic skin is based on the science behind the human fingerprint. It is comprised of a flexible surface that can sense texture. Beneath that lie sensors between sheets of graphene that can change shape when they encounter pressure. The movement then emits a small electrical charge that is transmitted to the to sensors and lets the team know how much pressure it is detecting.
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