New materials like human skin

Photo: LiveScience

US scientists are making a tactile sensor capable of responding to the pressure and smoothness of the surface equivalent to real fingers. This future breakthrough will pave the way for the creation of a robot-like robot arm.

Equipment is the product of Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf at the University of Nebraska. It is a film made from layers of semiconductor nanoparticles, separated by layers of non-conductive material. When pressure is applied to the film, these layers are compressed together, releasing light and measuring electric current. The intensity of the light and the output current depends on the strength of the pressure set.

In one demonstration, the researchers placed a coin on the sensor film. The lines of President Lincoln's clothing, along with TY's letter "LIBERTY" printed on a coin, appear in the film, in the form of blobs. This image was recorded by the camera and then loaded into the computer.

Most robots now use the so-called binary touch sensor, meaning that it can only tell if it touches something or not. Researchers have created more advanced sensors, but either they are too hard to make, or too fragile to withstand mechanical force in practice, or too expensive to produce on a large scale. .

The sensor film glows under the pressure of an American coin. ( Photo: LiveScience )

New-generation sensors have the potential to overcome all of these obstacles, not to mention new benefits. For example, it has better spatial resolution than other sensors. If older sensors only distinguish objects that are about 2 millimeters wide, the new sensor can detect objects with a few tens of micrometers.

Thanks to its superior properties, the new sensor can be particularly useful in medicine where it is used in microscopic invasive procedures.

T. An