E-skin responds to touch

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, just developed a paper-thin e-skin that responds to touch by lighting up. This can help robots become more sensitive. A fully fabricated 16×16 pixel e-skin that lights up when touched. Image © Ali Javey and Chuan Wang

The research team led by Ali Javey, created the first electronic skin, a user-interactive sensor on flexible plastic, responding to touch by lighting up. The intensity of the emitted light quantifies the size of the applied pressure.

Ali Javey from UC Berkeley, said:

“We are not just making devices; we are building systems. With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing.”