Electronic skin with human-like sensory capabilities has been widely applied to artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, and the prosthetic hand for expanding the sensing ability of robots. Robotic electronic skin (RES) based on conductive hydrogel is developed to collect strain and pressure data for improving the grasping capability of the robot finger. RES is fabricated and assembled by the soft functional materials through a sol–gel process for guaranteeing the overall softness. The strain sensor based on piezoresistive hydrogel (gauge factor ~9.98) is integrated onto the back surface of the robot finger to collect the bending angle of the robot finger. The capacitive pressure sensor based on a hydrogel electrode (sensitivity: 0.105 kPa−1 below 3.61 kPa, and 0.0327 kPa−1 in the range from 4.12 to 15 kPa.) is adhered onto the fingertip to collect the pressure data when touching the objects. A robot-finger-compatible RES with strain and pressure sensing function is designed for finger gesture detection and grasping manipulation. The negative force feedback control framework is built to improve grasping manipulation of the robot finger with RES, which would provide a self-adaptive control method to determine whether the objects are grasped successfully or not. Robot fingers integrated with soft sensors would promote the development of sensing and grasping abilities of the robot finger and interaction with human beings.

Japanese scientists have developed a "slightly sweaty" robotic finger covered in living skin in an advance they say brings truly human-like robots a step closer. The finger, which was shown to be able to heal itself, is seen as an impressive technical feat that blurs the line between living flesh and machine. But scientists were divided on whether people would warm to its lifelike anatomy or find it creepy. "We are surprised by how well the skin tissue conforms to the robot's surface," said Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, who led the work. "But this work is just the first step toward creating robots covered with living skin."

Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says. To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg officially announced that his company was changing its name from Facebook to Meta, with a prominent new focus on creating the metaverse. A defining feature of this metaverse will be creating a feeling of presence in the virtual world. Presence could mean simply interacting with other avatars and feeling like you are immersed in a foreign landscape. Or, it could even involve engineering some sort of haptic feedback for users when they touch or interact with objects in the virtual world. As part of all this, a division of Meta called Meta AI wants to help machines learn how humans touch and feel by using a robot finger sensor called DIGIT, and a robot skin called ReSkin.

Current commercial robots generally contain hard parts that represent a risk to the security of their administrators or there is a point of confinement for their usability. Because of this, soft robots have as of late pulled in impressive consideration, in spite of the fact that their absence of structural inflexibility intensely restricts their utilization in numerous practical applications. In the course of recent years, analysts have tried to make mechanical robotic personal assistants and bionic limbs or prosthetics that consolidate the strength of regular robots with the flexibility of soft robots. More recently, combinations of cellular structures have demonstrated intriguing advancement toward the enhancement of non-trifling abilities, for example, getting a handle on exceptionally shaped articles. In any case, tuning the mechanical properties of the robotic body for custom applications is still exceptionally challenging.

Robots that can disable bombs, perform delicate surgery or nimbly handle cooking ingredients could be just around the corner, thanks to a new wonder material. Experts have created an artificial skin from silicon rubber - the same type found in the straps of swimming goggles - that could give machines a human-like sense of touch. Stretchable membranes containing sensors, connected by channels half the width of a human hair, provide tactile feedback on a par with our own. The biologically inspired breakthrough could also be used to create more advanced prosthetic devices, to let people who have lost limbs feel again. Robots that can disable bombs, perform delicate surgery or nimbly handle cooking ingredients could be just around the corner.

When you think about it, touch is a bizarre sense. Unlike sound or light, tactile properties can be difficult to quantify. You can measure decibels or lumens, but touch is a subjective sense with subjective descriptions, like rough or squishy or cold. Subjective until now, that is. A company called SynTouch, which spun out of the University of Southern California, has created a robotic fingertip that rubs a material and precisely measures the "feel" of it in 15 dimensions, ranging from coarseness to coolness.