Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Robotic skin: Researchers created a material twice as sensitive as human skin

Dyllan Furness
By

artificial skin snake artificialskin
Raffaele di Giacomo / ETH Zurich
Pit vipers have an organ between their nose and eyes that allows can detect prey in pitch dark at a distance of a few feet. This “pit organ” is the most sensitive in the animal kingdom, twice as sensitive as human skin and many time more precise than artificial thermometers.

But a team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have now designed a material that exceeds the sensitivity of human skin and even matches the sensitivity of the pit organ. Used as an artificial skin, the material may provide hypersensitive feedback for prosthetic and robotic limbs.

Recommended Videos

After studies showed that pectin (a substance found in plant cell walls and in kitchens as a gelling agent for jams) could be used as an artificial sensor, project lead Raffaele Di Giacomo from ETH Zurich began to test the substance further. Pectin proved to be a remarkable material for high-sensitivity sensors, but it was too rigid until Di Giacomo and doctoral student Luca Bonanomi developed a thin film of pectin only 100 micrometers thick.

The researchers have since demonstrated that this film can detect detect slight changes in temperature and is responsive in a broad range of temperatures, including the operational range of human skin.

To test the artificial skin, Di Giacomo and his team used a stuffed animal heated to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the average body temperature of a mouse, and held it in front of the film. The material could detect the stuffed animal even at a few week away. “This demonstrated we have the same performance when you compare the snake membrane with our membrane,” Di Giacomo told Digital Trends. “If you measure the membrane of the snake and ours you have the same variation of electrical response and distance.”

“This is the first time that we’ve even exceeded the sensitivity of the human skin,” Di Giacomo added.

The researchers think their material will find applications in robotics and prosthetics, where it could be used as an artificial skin.

“It’s important for a person with a robotic arm to have complete sensory feedback from the artificial limb,” Di Giacomo said. “And it has been demonstrated that in order to move an arm correctly, sight is not enough. You need the sensory feedback from the limb.”

A paper detailing their work was published this week in the journal Science Robotics.

Topics
Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness
Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more