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Artificial Skin, So Robots Can "Feel"
Engineering Design and Technology News Home
Engineers Edge - Sooner than later, robots
may have the ability to “feel.” In a paper published online March 26 in
Advanced Functional Materials, a team of researchers from the
A team of researchers at
Pitt made predictions regarding the behavior of Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) gel,
a material that was first fabricated in the late 1990s and shown to pulsate in
the absence of any external stimuli. In fact, under certain conditions, the gel
sitting in a petri dish resembles a beating heart.
Along with her colleagues,
Anna Balazs, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering in
Pitt’s Swanson School of HYPERLINK "https://www.engineering.pitt.edu/"EHYPERLINK
"https://www.engineering.pitt.edu/"ngineering,
predicted that BZ gel not previously oscillating could be re-excited by
mechanical pressure. The prediction was actualized by MIT researchers, who
proved that chemical oscillations can be triggered by mechanically compressing
the BZ gel beyond a critical stress. A video from the MIT group showing this
unique behavior can be accessed at https://vvgroup.scripts.mit.edu/WP/?p=1078
“Think of it like human
skin, which can provide signals to the brain that something on the body is
deformed or hurt,” says Balazs. “This gel has numerous far-reaching
applications, such as artificial skin that could be sensory—a holy grail in
robotics.”
Balazs says the gel could
serve as a small-scale pressure sensor for different vehicles or instruments to
see whether they’d been bumped, providing diagnostics for the impact on
surfaces. This sort of development—and materials like BZ gel—are things Balazs
has been interested in since childhood.
“My mother would often tease
me when I was young, saying I was like a mimosa plant— shy and bashful,” says
Balazs. “As a result, I became fascinated with the plant and 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.”
Also on Balazs’s research
team were Olga Kuksenok, research associate professor, and Victor Yashin,
visiting research assistant professor, both in Pitt’s Swanson School of
Engineering. At MIT, the work was performed by Krystyn Van Vliet, Paul M. Cook
Career Development Associate Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering,
and graduate student Irene Chen. (Group Web site: https://vvgroup.scripts.mit.edu/WP/).
Funding for this research
was provided by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army.
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