Better at sensing than human skin, a skin consisting of two layers of electrodes wrapped around an ion-infused sponge can identify adjacent objects and their materials.
Since artificial skin can detect and recognize objects that it hasn’t yet touched, it is even more effective at object detection than human skin.
Yifan Wang from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore says, “Human skin needs to touch things to inform it what is there.” “Human skin can only detect an object’s softness or hardness. We desired extra capabilities for our artificial skin.
Wang and his colleagues’ artificial skin can detect whether an object is nearby without having to touch it, and it can also determine some cues about the material it is made of. We are able to determine whether it is made of metal, plastic, or biological substance, he claims.
Two outer layers of conductive cloth coated with nickel act as electrodes and make up the skin. These are positioned around a porous sponge that has been saturated with ionic liquid, a salt solution that serves as an electrical conductor. As a capacitor, the two layers store electrical energy in an electric field.
The capacitor, which efficiently calculates how much the distance between the two layers of electrodes varies, performs better thanks to the ions in the sponge. The artificial skin’s capacity to recognize small changes is what enables it to recognize when it has touched something.
The capacitor’s detecting capability, which Wang claims is 10 to 100 times more sensitive than a typical capacitor, enables it to sense when items are nearby by picking up on extremely slight changes in the electric field surrounding the skin. Additionally, those minute adjustments can aid it in determining the composition of an object nearby.
In tests, the skin was able to identify and successfully categorize a variety of things as being either polymer, metal, or skin, as shown by particular changes in the capacitor’s data.
“The procedure is not too difficult. According to Jonathan Aitken from the University of Sheffield in the UK, “the component enters the boundaries of the capacitive structure’s electric field as it approaches contact.” Although he acknowledges that there are a number of promising future directions, the skin currently compares the object it detects with data on recognized materials using machine learning techniques.
In addition to being helpful for prosthetics, Wang believes the skin may function on a robotic finger to help factory robots learn which items to pick up and which to leave without having to grasp them.
