Sensitive skin is a large-area, flexible array of sensors with data processing capabilities, which can be used to cover the entire surface of a machine or even a part of a human body. Depending on the skin electronics, it endows its carrier with an ability to sense its surroundings via the skin’s proximity, touch, pressure, temperature, chemical/biological, or other sensors. Sensitive skin devices will make possible the use of unsupervised machines operating in unstructured, unpredictable surroundings among people, among many obstacles, outdoors on a crowded street, undersea, or on faraway planets. Sensitive skin will make machines “cautious” and thus friendly to their environment. This will allow us to build machine helpers for the disabled and elderly, bring sensing to human prosthetics, and widen the scale of machines’ use in service industry. With their ability to produce and process massive data flow, sensitive skin devices will make yet another advance in the information revolution. This paper surveys the state of the art and research issues that need to be resolved in order to make sensitive skin a reality.
This seminar focuses on the principles, methodology, and prototypes of sensitive skin-like devices, and the related system intelligence and software that are necessary to make those devices work. Sensitive skin represents a new paradigm in sensing and control. These devices will open doors to a whole class of novel enabling technologies, with a potentially very wide impact. Far-reaching applications not feasible today will be realized, ranging from medicine and biology to the machine industry and defense. They will allow us to fulfill our dream for machines sensitive to their surroundings and operating in unstructured environment.
Some applications that sensitive skin devices will make possible are yet hard to foresee. Flexible semiconductor films and flexible metal interconnects that will result from this work will allow us to develop new inexpensive consumer electronics products, new types of displays, printers, new ways to store and share information (like electronic paper and “upgradeable” books and maps). New device concepts suitable for large area flexible semiconductor films will lead to new sensors that will find applications in space exploration and defense, specifically in mine detection and active camouflage.
An ability of parallel processing of massive amounts of data from millions of sensors will find applications in environmental control and power industry. These areas will be further developed because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of the work on sensitive skin, which lies at the intersection of information technology, mechanical engineering, material science, biotechnology, and micro- and nano electronics. Availability of sensitive skin hardware is likely to spur theoretical and experimental work in many other disciplines that are far removed from robotics.
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