Robots will wear e-skin
All of those images of robots that we have amassed from scifi pictures and TV series may have it all wrong. Robots won’t be covered in metal, but in a rubberized e-skin developed by researchers at Japan’s Tokyo University.
According to AFP, Takao Someya at Tokyo University’s School of Engineering, leads the team of researchers that have come up with the new rubberized robot skin. The material is able to conduct electricity allowing robots to feel heat and pressure.
The e-skin is actually made of elastic material embedded with carbon nanotubes which “boasts conductivity some 570 times as high as commercially available rubbers filled with carbon particles”. The material can also be used as a form of elastic wiring and not just for e-skin.
If used as wiring, the material can make elastic integrated circuits (ICs), which can be stretched to up to 1.7 times their original size and mounted on curved surfaces with no mechanical damage or major change in conductivity.
The material is made by “grinding” up carbon nanotubes adding an ionic liquid and then adding the mixture to rubber. This process allows the nanotubes to be “uniformly dispersed” throughout the material aiding the flexibility and conductivity.
Although the material is stretchy there are a few minor limitations. If stretched to its maximum, 2.3 times the original, its conductivity drops in half. But it can be stretched to 38 percent with no detectible loss in conductivity.
This new flexible conductive material can be used in a myriad of ways beyond just covering robots. Other suggested uses have been to cover steering wheels, used a a bed covering for bed-ridden invalids, as a new type of stretchable display.
As a steering wheel cover, the material would be able to monitor the skin condition and pressure of the vehicle driver. The material would be able to determine the fitness of the drive to continue to drive or determine if any crisis or emergency medical condition has occurred. Because of its conductivity, the material could then transmit the information to monitors within the car or outside of the car requesting help.
As a mattress cover for bed-ridden invalids, the material would be able to monitor the condition of the patients skin and where pressure points and alert caregivers. Patients can then be shifted to avoid bed sores or soiled sheets can be changed. If the material becomes sophisticated enough, it could even monitor vital signs at given intervals.
The most unique idea, is to use the material as a portable stretchable display. This would be something like a stretchy rubber handkerchief that you can enlarge to watch TV.
As the material undergoes further testing and becomes commercially available, more uses will be discovered for this material that promises to revolutionize not only robotics, but possibly medical care, and TV viewing.
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