New Artificial Skin That Exceeds Human Touch Sensitivity Could Help Develop Futuristic Robots, Other Electronics

The sense of touch is important in many ways that people do not realize, especially after a 2016 survey that showed vision ranks as the most important sense. Although each sense is important, the sense of touch assists people to avoid hot stoves, determine the weight and composition of objects, and nowadays tap on touchscreen devices.

Now, scientists are building futuristic robots and electronics that are designed with particular attention to touch. Researchers wrote in their study, titled "A Dual-Responsive Artificial Skin for Tactile and Touchless Interfaces" that they have developed artificial skin that may be more touch-sensitive than human skin.

Taking Artificial Skin Sensitivity to the Next Level

Artificial skin technology has taken off in recent years due to the advancement of increasingly advanced 3D-printing technologies. Most of them were aimed at giving robots or other devices the sensation of human touch, such as the artificial developed by a team of engineers from Singapore that can read Braille with over 90% accuracy, and the artificial skin from Australia that detects pain.

But the recent trend is aimed at going beyond the limits by designing a new technology that can detect toxic chemicals with touch alone, Inverse reported. The artificial skin by Yifan Wang's team can even do that even without physical touch.

Wang is a mechanical engineer from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the co-author of the study. He said that it could identify whether an object is far away or near even without touching it. Wang and his team think that artificial skin will advance robotics, improve touchscreen interfaces, and restore people's sense of touch.

The composition of their artificial skin is quite straightforward. It has two thin, flexible fabric electrodes placed between two layers of spongy material saturated in an ion-sensitive liquid. The material functions as a capacitor, which is extremely sensitive to changes in pressure or charge between electrodes.

The artificial skin is so sensitive that it can detect whether it is close to an item even without touching it, owing to its porous ion layer that has a shark-like capacity to detect even the minute changes in its electric field caused by other objects.

When they tested it with a robotic finger, they found that it can detect objects even before touching them due to the varying levels of capacitance signal. The artificial skin was able to differentiate between a variety of textures as it touches the objects directly.

Iontronics: An Emerging Technology

In the study, researchers used the electrical double layers (EDL) that develop within a highly porous iontronic sponge to create an upgraded artificial skin. As per Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, iontronics is an emerging technology that includes the complex management of ions as signal carriers in solid-state electronics and biological systems.

Natural iontronics is the transmission of information through neurons that dynamically polarize or depolarize when ions move across membranes. The iontronics concept states that structural and functional components of aquatic circuits work and interact via ions with varying charge, mobility, and affinity. Iontronic devices that utilize multi-ionic carriers.

As it resembles biology, it provides biocompatible and biodegradable logic circuits for sensing, eco-friendly monitoring, and brain-machine interface. It was demonstrated in the study, showing the dual mode of artificial skin using human-machine interfaces.

Distinct signals detected by the artificial skin upon approaching make it feasible for touchless object identification, a milestone for iontronic devices.

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