Robotic Skins

Continued developments in robotics, here in how they appear and interact with us.

These “Robotic Skins” Turn Everyday Objects Into Robots
A team at Yale University has developed flexible robotic sheets that can make just about anything move 

These “Robotic Skins” Turn Everyday Objects Into Robots
A team at Yale University has developed flexible robotic sheets that can make just about anything move    By Rachael Lallensack, Smithsonian

What if there was some kind of flexible, stretchy material that you could wrap around just about any random object and turn it into a robot? It sounds like a gadget that might belong to a superhero, but a team of researchers has developed just that.

They call it OmniSkins, in a paper published today in Science Robotics. It’s made of a combination of elastic materials (or fabric, in one version) embedded with sensors and actuators that when stuck to, wrapped around, or layered can make just about any inanimate object move. The team, led by roboticist Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio of Yale University, was able to apply the so-called skins to a broad range of stuff, from foam pool noodles to T-shirts, even icosahedrons, or geometric figures with 20 triangular faces.

“The reconfigurable and re-programmable nature of the soft robotic skins is very cool,” says Conor Walsh, a roboticist from Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “The idea that we can have a soft and flexible sheet, wrap it around any surface, have it learn what it is attached to and then move it in some desired way has a lot of potential.”  ... "