Robots and prosthetic devices may
soon have a sense of touch equivalent to, or better than, the human skin with
the Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin (ACES), an artificial nervous system
developed by a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore
(NUS). The new electronic skin system achieved ultra-high responsiveness and
robustness to damage and can be paired with any kind of sensor skin layers to
function effectively as an electronic skin.
Drawing inspiration from the
human sensory nervous system, the NUS team developed a sensor system that could
potentially perform better. While the ACES electronic nervous system detects
signals like the human sensor nervous system, it is made up of a network of
sensors connected via a single electrical conductor. It is also unlike existing
electronic skins which have interlinked wiring systems that can make them
sensitive to damage and difficult to scale up.
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