Electronic Skin Gives Robots a Sense of Touch 22
Zothecula writes "Providing robots with sensory inputs is one of the keys to the development of more capable and useful machines. Sight and hearing are the most common senses bestowed upon our mechanical friends, but even taste and smell have gotten a look. There have also been a number of efforts to give robots the sense of touch so they can better navigate and interact with their environments. The latest attempt to create a touchy feely robot comes from the Technical University Munich (TUM) where researchers have produced small hexagonal plates, which when joined together, form a sensitive skin."
Re:This will be a tricky one... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm reminded of an argument/discussion I once had with a friend of mine who read environmental *ahem* engineering about the differences between biological and synthetic systems, specifically plants vs. solar panels. He argued that trees are inherently superior to solar panels because they grow unaided from such a small thing as a seed. I didn't dispute this point, but couldn't help point out that you can't make a tree that's identical to the one next to it, even down to the metre or centimetre scale, much less micrometre.
One can't deny the merits of a living, self-repairing and self-assembling system like a tree or an insect, but if you want to have more than one copy you have to build it yourself. Robots with tactile senses are naturally going to have a big advantage of those that don't, but I think the best way to go about it would be to follow the same route as SKYNET supposedly did: build a metal robot, but give it a flesh coating. We can build large moving machines more efficiently than nature and given the manufacturing technology we might be able to do the same for smaller-scale parts too, but for the moment nature really does beat technology when it comes to producing things that function at small scales in bulk. Take image sensors as an example: we could probably make an artificial retina that's much more sensitive than the real thing but to produce a lot of them it's probably better just to settle for the squishy kind and replace the problems with silicon processing with petri dishes and simple nutrient broth.