[Tyler]

There's More Than One Way to Skin a Robot
     

It's been a while since we've posted about the state of the art in
robot skin but I was prompted to think about it this morning when I saw
this request
from Ben Goertzel on the AGI
mailing list:
Does anyone know if it's possible to purchase some sort of
artificial
skin for a robot, to enable it to "feel" things that touch it?  Even
something fairly crude would be worthwhile...

We've posted about a lot of robot
skin research initiatives over the
years. The first thing to notice is that there are several
possible applications for which something called robot skin might be
needed. The first is a flexible human-like skin to cover the bodies of
androids or prosthetic devices. This would involved several unique
properties not usually needed in other robot skin applications: 1) the
skin needs to be self healing 2) the skin needs to be flexible and soft
and 3) the skin needs to radiate the same level of heat as human skin.
Android skin needs one more thing that is shared with all robot
skin applications; the need to sense the environment. Human skin has
sensors for a
number of properties including pressure, heat, vibration, and pain, some
of which combine to form our perception of touch. Read on to find out
what the state of the art in robot skin is.
   

http://robots.net/article/2876.html