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.”

Without effective proprioception technology that can sense 3D shapes, soft robots struggle to understand their own speed, shape and weight and how these qualities interact with the immediate environment. By developing an e-skin with a high PGR, the Edinburgh team believes it has solved a major problem in the field, opening up potential applications for robotic-assisted surgery and mobility aids.  

“The flexibility of the technology we have developed means it could be applied to various soft robots to enable them to accurately perceive their own shape and movements,” said study co-leader Dr Francesco Giorgio-Serchi, also from Edinburgh’s the School of Engineering. “Ultimately, that means we are now closer to making some of the most exciting ideas in soft robotics a reality.”

The study, carried out in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong, received support from the Data Driven Innovation programme, part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. Edinburgh Innovations, the commercialisation service of the university, is working with the team to bring the technology to market.