Scientists in the UK have created a new kind of electronic skin that can give robots a more human-like sense of touch.
This soft, stretchable material acts like a glove that can be placed over robotic hands, allowing machines to feel heat, pressure, pain, and more—all using just one type of sensor.
Developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge and University College London, this low-cost, durable robotic skin could be a major step forward for machines that interact with people or delicate environments.
Their results were recently published in Science Robotics.
What makes this new skin so special is that the entire material acts as a sensor, not just small embedded areas.
Unlike most robotic skins that use different types of sensors for heat, pressure, and damage, this one material can detect all of these touches at once. This makes it simpler to build and less likely to break down over time.
The researchers created the skin by melting a soft, gelatin-like material that conducts electricity, and molding it into the shape of a human hand.
From just 32 tiny electrodes placed at the wrist, the skin was able to gather more than 1.7 million data points from the entire hand.
That’s because the material contains over 860,000 tiny electrical pathways, each helping to pick up different kinds of physical contact.
To teach the robotic hand what each type of touch meant, the team tested the skin in a wide range of scenarios.
They blasted it with a heat gun, gently tapped it, pressed it with a robotic arm, and even cut it with a scalpel. Each interaction produced a unique response, which was then fed into a machine learning model to help the robot interpret those touches correctly in the future.
The skin doesn’t yet match the sensitivity of human skin, but it comes close—and it’s better than any other robotic skin currently available, according to the researchers. It’s also much easier and cheaper to produce.
Since it uses just one type of sensor that reacts in different ways depending on the kind of touch, it avoids the complexity of layering different sensors that can interfere with each other.
This new technology could be used in a wide range of fields, from advanced prosthetic limbs to robots working in dangerous environments like disaster zones or factories. The researchers hope to improve the material’s durability and eventually test it in more real-world settings.
For now, this breakthrough shows how robots could soon be able to feel the world around them with a level of sensitivity that’s closer to human touch than ever before.
Source: University of Cambridge.
