With humanity increasingly relying on robotics in our everyday lives, scientists keep working on improving the capabilities of these technologies, and the most recent breakthrough is enhancing robots’ ability to feel the materials they touch.
Indeed, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have just created a new multimodal tactile sensor inspired by human fingertips, which can detect the direction of forces and accurately discern among 12 common materials, according to a TechXplore report from April 17.
As it happens, electronic engineers have already devised a number of highly sensitive tactile sensors in the previous few decades, but accurate detection of the direction and magnitude of applied forces, as well as the correct identification of the surfaces that materials are of, have remained a challenge.
With the latest breakthrough, scientists have addressed this challenge and increased the technology’s application possibilities across various industries, including robotics, security systems, virtual reality (VR) equipment, and sophisticated prosthetics.
How the finger-shaped sensor works
Specifically, in the paper, authors Chengcheng Han, Zhi Cao, and their colleagues explained that:
“Multimodal tactile perception is crucial for advancing human-computer interaction, but real-time multidimensional force detection and material identification remain challenging. (…) Here, a finger-shaped tactile sensor (FTS) based on the triboelectric effect is proposed, capable of multidirectional force sensing and material identification.”
Furthermore, this sensor shares the shape of a human fingertip and comprises two main complementary structures – an external section that can identify materials and an internal section that can sense forces and their direction. As Han, Cao, and colleagues added:
“In the force-sensing section, the silicone shell’s outer surface is coated with conductive silver paste as a shielding layer. The inner wall has four silicone microneedle arrays and a silicone bump, while five silver electrodes are coated on the internal polylactic acid skeleton. The components connect via interlocking structures near the fingernail, allowing localized contact and separation between the silicone shell and skeleton, enabling force direction detection through signals from the five electrodes.”
Finally, the study’s authors have conducted a series of tests for their finger-shaped tactile sensor – through initial simulations and real-world experiments – discovering that it performed well in contact with different forces, correctly identifying various materials.
Moreover, they successfully integrated the sensor with a robotic hand, using the data analysis platforms LabVIEW and Jupyter to identify materials based on the data it picked up, delivering promising results in this area and suggesting massive potential in enhancing tactile capabilities in current robotic systems, such as the Helix AI household robot.
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