This catches us up on the state of artificial touch protocols that are
certainly desirable but also obviously difficult to attain. This item describes success with a
prospective enabling material.
It also sounds like it could make the mother of all keyboards without
fussing with micro-switches.
There may be a great range of simple applications long before we try
to gussy up a robotic application. Once again rethinking the push button may be
timely and welcome.
Oscillating gels may one
day grant robots a sense of touch
By James Holloway
06:17 April 2, 2012
Researches have successfully
resuscitated non-oscillating BZ gel in a development that could help pave the
way to robots with a sense of touch
Researchers at MIT and the
University of Pittsburgh have successfully resuscitated non-oscillating
Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) gel by exerting a mechanical force: a process akin to
the resuscitation of a human heart. By exhibiting a chemical response to a
mechanical stimulus (a rare feat for non-living matter), it's thought the
material could lead to the development of artificial skin that would enable
robots to feel and self-repair. But though the application sounds similar to
the bleeding, healing artificial skin we looked at last week, the
science behind it is very different.
"Think of it like human
skin, which can provide signals to the brain that something on the body is
deformed or hurt," said Anna Balazs, Distinguished Professor of Chemical
and Petroleum Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering at Pittsburgh.
"This gel has numerous far-reaching applications, such as artificial skin
that could be sensory - a holy grail in robotics."
BZ gel, which was first
fabricated in the late 1990s, pulsates by means of a Belousov–Zhabotinsky
reaction (discovered by Boris Belousov in the 1950s). The oscillation of the BZ
gel can be made to stop by the addition of bromide. The research team's achievement
was to return such a sample to life (or the appearance of it) by applying
pressure, forcing the bromide out of the gel and restarting the BZ reaction.
The ability to revive BZ gel had been predicted by researchers at Pittsburgh,
and now proven at MIT.
Though touch-sensitive robot
skin might be some way off, research at Pittsburgh continues into using BZ gels
as damage sensors that could trigger a chemical reaction to instigate healing.
It's also claimed that the gel could one day form the basis of robot actuators
(muscles, essentially).
Balazs says she has been
interested in touch-sensitive materials since becoming fascinated with mimosa
plants as a child. "I became fascinated with [...] its unique
hide-and-seek qualities - the plant leaves fold inward and droop when touched
or shaken, reopening just minutes later. I knew there had to be a scientific
application regarding touch, which led me to studies like this in mechanical
and chemical energy."
The team's research was
published on March 26 in Advanced Functional Materials.
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