Scientists Create Artificial Skin That Has More Capabilities Than Human Skin

Scientists managed to create a new type of artificial skin. (photo: doc. Unsplash)

JAKARTA - So far, human skin has the most advanced senses, but scientists have succeeded in creating something much better than that with a new type of artificial skin.

A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore created a dual-responsive artificial skin to detect not only the pressure applied by an object, but also the object's approach.

This technology has a wide range of potential applications with regard to next-generation electronics, including human-machine and robotic interfaces.

“Human skin has to touch something to know what's there, and can only tell the softness or hardness of an object. We wanted our artificial skin to have more functions," said assistant professor Yifan Wang from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore

Even without touching the object, Wang and his colleagues' artificial skin can sense if it is nearby and can also discern some clues about what kind of material it is made of.

"We can tell whether it is a piece of metal, plastic or some biological material. Unlike human skin which perceives most of the information from the act of touching, this artificial skin also acquires rich cognitive information which is encoded in operation without touch or approach," said Wang.

"This work could lead to next-generation robotic perception technologies that are superior to existing tactile sensors," he added.

The skin consists of two outer layers of conductive cloth which are coated with nickel to serve as electrodes. It surrounds a porous sponge immersed in an ionic liquid, which is a salt in a liquid state that acts as a conduit for electricity. The two layers act as capacitors, storing electrical energy in an electric field.

The ions in the sponge increase the performance of the capacitor, effectively measuring how far the distance between two layers of electrodes changes. This ability to detect small shifts is what underlies how artificial skin can detect that it has touched something.

The sensing performance of the capacitor, which Wang claims is between 10 and 100 times more sensitive than a standard capacitor, means it is also able to detect very small changes in the electric field around the skin, allowing it to sense when objects are nearby.

What's more, those subtle changes can help him identify what kind of material nearby objects are made of. The research was published in the scientific journal Small.

Scientists have tested the skin in various ways, including scrolling electronic screens, navigating with maps, and manipulating virtual video game characters, quoted from NewScientist, Thursday, January 26.

Wang thinks skin could act on robotic fingers to allow factory robots to better understand which objects to pick up and which to leave without having to hold them, as well as being useful for prostheses.