Researchers Create Artificial Skin To Give Robots Sense Of Touch

As robots get more advanced and perform more complicated tasks, such as conducting a philharmonic orchestra in Italy, there is still one thing the machines certainly cannot do: feel. However, if scientists from the University of Houston have anything to say about it, that may change soon, at least insofar as the sense of touch is concerned. Cunjiang Yu, an assistant professor at the university and three other researchers created "a semiconductor in a rubber composite format" that can stretch and still retain functionality, allowing a robotic hand to feel temperature differences and distinguish between hot and cold. Writing in the journal Science Advances, they described "a new mechanism for producing stretchable electronics, a process that relies upon readily available materials and could be scaled up for commercial production," according to a statement on the university' website. Semiconductors are usually brittle and incorporating them into stretchable materials usually involves complicated procedures, Yu said in the statement, making the resulting materials both less stable and more expensive than the new material created by his team.