This Strange New Electronic Skin Can Let Robots Sniff Out Explosives and COVID
Our future robotic overlords may be closer to acquiring a human-like sense of touch, but they’re also closer to moving beyond that—and attaining a superhuman ability to sense and interact with their environment.
Researchers at Caltech have created an electronic skin that can pick up pressure and temperature but also sense chemicals like TNT and viruses like COVID. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, the flexible synthetic skin is imbued with an array of chemical sensors that each sense a unique stimuli. This versatile and supersensitive skin could be the future of intelligent robotic systems that can detect hazardous chemical leaks or ecological dangers before humans catch notice. It may even help us prevent future viral outbreaks that could otherwise lead to a COVID-level pandemic.
“Robotic physicochemical sensing has broad applications in agriculture, security, environmental protection, and public health, especially when operating in extreme and hazardous environments,” Wei Gao, a chemical engineer at Caltech and the study’s lead researcher, told The Daily Beast in an email.
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