Researchers at Stanford University have developed a digital electronic skin that can convert sensations such as heat and pressure into electrical signals that can be read by electrodes implanted in the human brain.
Electronic skin is soft and stretchable while mimicking the sense of touch and operating efficiently at low voltage
This electronic skin is as soft as real leather, and the conversion elements are seamlessly embedded in it, with a thickness of only tens of nanometers. The development opens up the possibility of a more natural interaction between artificial intelligence prosthetics and the brain and lays the groundwork for building robots that can “feel” human sensations such as pain, pressure and temperature.
“Our dream is to make a complete hand with multiple sensors that can sense pressure, strain, temperature and vibration, and then we can provide a A real feeling.”
The new electronic skin only needs to operate at 5 volts to detect stimuli similar to real skin, offering electrical performance comparable to polysilicon transistors, such as low-voltage drive, low power consumption, and modest circuit integration.
A key reason people give up using prosthetics is that the lack of sensory feedback makes them feel unnatural and uncomfortable, the researchers said. The e-skin was first tested in the brain cells of rats. When their cerebral cortex was stimulated, the animals twitched their legs in proportion to their stress levels. “Electronic skin erases the boundary between living organisms and machine components,” said the researchers, whose report, “The Disappearing Boundary Between Organisms and Machines,” was published this week in the journal Science.
It is noticed that as early as March last year, scientists at the University of Edinburgh announced related progress. They created an electronic skin consisting of a thin layer of silicon embedded with wires and sensitive detectors that “enables soft robots to sense objects that are only millimeters away from them in all directions at extremely fast speeds,” a development “for the first time. endowing robots with a level of physical self-awareness similar to humans and animals.”
