Imagine an electronic skin that is capable of actually experiencing pain that can be used in order to create a new generation of robots who will be able to feel certain things just like the humans. It may sound like the plot of a science fiction novel, but it is now a reality thanks to a team of researchers led by Ravinder Dahiya in the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering. The skin can be a huge step towards creating superior prosthetics and according to the researchers, this can also lead to “large-scale neuromorphic printed e-skin capable of responding appropriately to stimuli”.
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“We all learn early on in our lives to respond appropriately to unexpected stimuli like pain in order to prevent us from hurting ourselves again. Of course, the development of this new form of electronic skin didn’t really involve inflicting pain as we know it – it’s simply a shorthand way to explain the process of learning from external stimulus,” professor Dahiya said according to PTI.
“What we’ve been able to create through this process is an electronic skin capable of distributed learning at the hardware level, which doesn’t need to send messages back and forth to a central processor before taking action. Instead, it greatly accelerates the process of responding to touch by cutting down the amount of computation required,” he added.
A new type of electronic skin capable of feeling ‘pain’ could help create a new generation of smart robots and prosthetics.
The skin was developed by @RavinderSDahiya and his @BEST_UofG group at @UofGEngineering.
Read the full story here 👉 https://t.co/EE94KiwgNH pic.twitter.com/LRlHUZzEsL
— University of Glasgow (@UofGlasgow) June 2, 2022
In the paper titled ‘Printed Synaptic Transistors based Electronic Skin for Robots to Feel and Learn’, the researchers explained that the e-skin uses a grid of 168 synaptic transistors made from zinc-oxide nanowires present on its surface to send a signal to the synaptic transistor.
When the sensor is alerted, it registers the amount of pressure applied on the nanowires and replicates the sensation of a touch – essentially how neurons work in a human body
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