This gadget isn’t likely to immediately impact your health (unless you’re an android) but NASA is developing a tactile skin-like sensor wrap for its spacefaring robots:
Lumelsky, until recently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has begun setting up a laboratory at Goddard to develop a high-tech covering that would enable robots to sense their environment and react to it, much like humans respond when something or someone touches their skin….
Although great headway is being made in the area of computer vision, vision isn’t enough, he said. “Humans can survive without sight, but they can’t survive without tactile sensing. The skin is the biggest organ in our body. It’s nothing more than a huge sensor.”
The idea is to develop a “sensitive skin” that technicians could use to cover a robot. This skin will include more than 1,000 infrared sensors that would detect an object, and send the information to the robot’s “brain.” The brain would digest the information, apply reasoning and react within milliseconds by directing the robot to move.
The current version is gray, but I have a feeling the next generation of ‘spacefaring robots’ will have pale yellow skin…
More from Dr. Vladimir Lumelsky’s work … [PDF]
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