Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com Stanford University researchers have developed a digital electronic skin that converts sensations such as heat and pressure into electrical signals that can be read by electrodes implanted in the human brain.

The electronic skin is soft and stretchable, while also imitating touch and operating efficiently at low voltages. The electronic skin is soft as leather, and the conversion elements are seamlessly embedded in it, with a thickness of only a few tens of nanometers. This development opens up the possibility of more natural interaction between artificial limbs and the brain, and lays the groundwork for robots that can "feel" human sensations such as pain, stress and temperature.

Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University and one of the participants in the project, said: "Our dream is to make a complete hand with multiple sensors that can sense pressure, strain, temperature and vibration, and then we can provide a real feeling." "

The new electronic skin operates at only 5 volts, detects stimuli similar to real skin, and offers electrical properties comparable to polysilicon transistors, such as low voltage drive, low power consumption, and modest circuit integration.

Researchers say a key reason people give up using prosthetics is that the lack of sensory feedback makes them feel unnatural and uncomfortable. The electronic skin was first tested in brain cells of rats, and when their cerebral cortex was stimulated, the animals twitched their legs to a degree corresponding to stress levels. "Electronic skin eliminates the boundary between biological and machine components," the researchers said. Their report,"The Boundary Between Disappearing Creatures and Machines," appears this week in Science.

CTOnews.com notes that scientists at Edinburgh University announced a related development back in March last year. They created an electronic skin consisting of thin layers of silicon embedded with wires and sensitivity detectors that "enable soft robots to perceive objects only millimeters away from them in all directions at extremely fast speeds," a development that "for the first time gives robots a level of physical self-awareness similar to humans and animals."

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