Biomimetic e-skin promises soft-robotics leap

Just 1mm thick, the e-skin is made of a thin layer of silicone embedded with wires and sensors. By pairing the e-skin with artificial intelligence, the Edinburgh team was able to deliver real-time, three-dimensional sensory awareness with millimetre accuracy. Testing it on a soft robotic arm, the e-skin could detect a range of complex bending, stretching and twisting movements across every part of the device.

According to the team, the artificial skin is the first of its kind to mimic the sensory perception of complex living organisms such as mammals, achieving a high proprioceptive geometry resolution (PGR) of 3,900. This advanced sensitivity could herald a major leap froward for soft robotic devices. The work is published in Nature Machine Intelligence.  

“The perceptive senses endowed to robotic devices by this new technology are similar to those of people and animals,” said study lead Dr Yunjie Yang, from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering. “This new level of physical self-awareness represents a step change in the sensing capabilities of soft robots.”