In the pursuit of making human-like robots, sometimes it’s not enough to give them freaky yet believable facial expressions, or a killer sense of humor. Sometimes you have to give them actual human skin.
Engineers at the University of Tokyo have found a way to put human skin on a robotic finger that damn near feels like the real deal. In a, the grafted skin—a mashup of collagen, precursor skin cells, and skin cells that produce keratin—kept the animatronic finger water-repellent and, creepily enough, self-healing. It could be a big step to building robots with living skin just as functional, sensing, and responsive as our own.
“With that method, you have to have the hands of a skilled artisan who can cut and tailor the skin sheets,” Shoji Takeuchi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo and the paper’s co-author, This process involves dunking a three-jointed robotic finger into a pink solution eerily reminiscent of the. The solution contains collagen, a protein that provides structural support to skin and other tissues in the body, and human dermal fibroblasts, cells that produce collagen and repair skin cells. Over the course of seven days, the collagen and fibroblasts conform to the robotic finger, giving rise to the innermost layer of skin called the dermis.
With its new skin, the motorized finger feels and looks nearly like a real digit. Its epidermis was thick enough to pinch with a pair of tweezers and repel water. When the researchers cut it to simulate a wound, the finger’s living skin healed itself much like human skin albeit with some help from a sheet of collagen much like a Band-Aid.
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