Self-healing e-skin to enable skin sense in robots: Researchers

New Delhi : Self-healing e-skin to give robots human skin sense that helps humans in knowing that they are alive.

A team of researchers from the University of Boulder are making efforts to create an adaptable 'electronic skin' that will also be capable of self-healing if gets damaged.

E-skin will establish safer interactions between robots and humans in the future, said Jianliang Xiao.

Xiao also added, "Sensing is critical because when human beings interact with robots; we want to make sure that robots don’t hurt people. When the baby is sick, the robot can just use a finger to touch the surface…it can tell what the temperature of the baby is."

The findings of the research have been published in the journal Science Advances.

The e-skin will have sensors capable of measuring airflow, pressure, humidity and temperature.

Xiao added, "For robotics, it might not be very necessary to integrate e-skins with industrial robots to provide sensing capabilities at this point. But for robots that physically interact with humans, e-skins are very important to provide sensing and feedback of touching, holding and monitoring."