This would open new possibilities for carrying out, without any human help, tasks that require great precision and control of the applied force, according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, and the Querrey Simpson Institute of Bioelectronics, dependent on Northwestern University, in Illinois, United States.
It would also be very useful in the field of healthcare, where robots could take a patient’s pulse, clean their body, or massage a part of their body.
In addition to providing care for the elderly, robots with appendages as soft and touch-sensitive as human hands could be used in disasters.
In these events, they could treat injured people and even search for them under the rubble and carefully remove them, administering first aid, including, for example, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
According to experts, the new elastic electronic skin solves an important problem with this emerging technology, since previously existing ones lose detection accuracy as the material stretches.
They explained that just as human skin has to stretch and bend to adapt to our movements, electronic skin does too; Furthermore, no matter how much it is stretched, the response to pressure does not change, and that is an important achievement, they said.
In demonstrations, elasticity allowed researchers to create inflatable appendages that could change shape to perform various tasks requiring high tactile sensitivity.
In swollen mode, the appendix was used on human subjects to accurately capture their pulse; while in deflated mode, the tongs can do things like hold a glass without it falling, the scientific experiment showed.
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