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Pain-sensing electronic skin? Thanks to an Indian scientist, it is now a reality!

Consider an electronic skin that can feel pain and can be utilized to produce a new generation of robots that can feel certain things much like humans. It may seem like the premise of a science fiction novel, but it is now a reality due to a team of researchers led by Ravinder Dahiya from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering. According to the researchers, this can lead to ‘large-scale neuromorphic printed e-skin capable of reacting correctly to inputs’.

‘We all learn early in life to respond correctly to unexpected stimuli such as pain in order to avoid further injury to ourselves. Of course, the invention of this novel type of electronic skin did not require the infliction of pain in the traditional sense; it is only a shorthand method of explaining the process of learning from external stimulation’, as per PTI, professor Dahiya stated.

‘We were able to construct an electronic skin capable of distributed learning at the hardware level. This is because it does not require messages to be sent back and forth to a central processor before acting. Instead, by reducing the amount of computing necessary, it considerably speeds the process of responding to touch ‘, he stated.

The researchers said in their study, ‘Printed Synaptic Transistors-based Electronic Skin for Robots to Feel and Learn,’ that the e-skin employs a grid of 168 synaptic transistors created from zinc-oxide nanowires located on its surface to transmit a signal to the synaptic transistor. When the sensor is triggered, it registers the amount of pressure applied to the nanowires and simulates the sense of touch, which is similar to how neurons function in the human body.

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