Engineers develop breakthrough 'robot skin'
Smart, stretchable and highly sensitive, a new soft sensor developed by UBC and Honda researchers opens the door to a wide range of applications in robotics and prosthetics.
Oct 26, 2023
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Smart, stretchable and highly sensitive, a new soft sensor developed by UBC and Honda researchers opens the door to a wide range of applications in robotics and prosthetics.
Oct 26, 2023
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We tend to take our sense of touch for granted in everyday settings, but it is vital for our ability to interact with our surroundings. Imagine reaching into the fridge to grab an egg for breakfast. As your fingers touch ...
Jun 2, 2022
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User-interactive electronic skin can map the sense of touch through electronic readouts to provide visual output as a readable response. However, the high power consumption, complex structure and high cost of electronic skin ...
Researchers at the University of Bristol have recently trained a deep-neural-network-based model to gather tactile information about 3-D objects. In their paper, published in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, they applied ...
What if you could touch a loved one during a video call—particularly in today's social distancing era of COVID-19—or pick up and handle a virtual tool in a video game?
Sep 9, 2020
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Picking up a blueberry or grape without squishing it isn't hard, but try teaching it to a robot. The same goes for walking on ice, turning a key to unlock a door or cooking a favorite dish.
Nov 3, 2021
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Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed electronic "stickers" that measure the force exerted by one object upon another. The force stickers are wireless, run without batteries and fit in tight spaces. ...
Oct 10, 2023
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To effectively interact with their surrounding environment, robots should be able to identify characteristics of different objects just by touching them, like humans do. This would allow them to get hold of and manage objects ...
Human skin is amazing. It senses temperature, pressure, and texture. It's able to stretch and spring back, time and again. And it provides a barrier between the body and external threats—bacteria, viruses, toxins, ultraviolet ...
Jun 1, 2023
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Imagine being able to build and use a robotic device without the need for expensive, specialist kit or skills. That is the vision that researchers from the University of Bristol have turned into reality, creating a lightweight, ...
Oct 20, 2019
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The somatosensory system is a diverse sensory system comprising the receptors and processing centres to produce the sensory modalities such as touch, temperature, proprioception (body position), and nociception (pain). The sensory receptors cover the skin and epithelia, skeletal muscles, bones and joints, internal organs, and the cardiovascular system. While touch is considered one of the five traditional senses, the impression of touch is formed from several modalities; In medicine, the colloquial term touch is usually replaced with somatic senses to better reflect the variety of mechanisms involved.
The system reacts to diverse stimuli using different receptors: thermoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors. Transmission of information from the receptors passes via sensory nerves through tracts in the spinal cord and into the brain. Processing primarily occurs in the primary somatosensory area in the parietal lobe of the cerebral cortex.
At its simplest, the system works when a sensory neuron is triggered by a specific stimulus such as heat; this neuron passes to an area in the brain uniquely attributed to that area on the body—this allows the processed stimulus to be felt at the correct location. The mapping of the body surfaces in the brain is called a homunculus and is essential in the creation of a body image.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA