In a society where technology and megacorporations rule pretty much everything, a sub-culture of predominantly technologically savvy people have chosen to paradoxically challenge the advances of technology that exist today. By creating a distopian world, cyberpunk effectively highlights a number of aspects including the negative impact of technology on humanity, the fusion of man and machine, the corporate control over society, uprising of the underground and ubiquitous access to information.
For this weeks tutorial, we were asked to create a cyberpunk of our own and in doing so, highlight one of the previously mentioned factors. I have chosen to bring attention to the fusion of man and machine by re-creating Richard Ingham's article, 'Scientists make artificial skin that can feel touch', by incorporating aspects from the 1999 film, Bicentennial Man.
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BIOTECH wizards have engineered electronic skin that can sense touch in a major step towards next-generation robotics and prosthetic limbs. The particular advancement is believed to improve upon the already rapidly rising success of the NBR-114. The lab-tested material responds to almost the same pressures as human skin and with the same speed.
Important hurdles remain but the exploit is an advance towards replacing today's touch-insensitive, clumsy robots and metal made,artificial limbs with smarter, touch-sensitive upgrades, they believe.
"Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it," said Ali Javey, an associate professor of computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, who led one of the research teams.
"If we ever wanted a robot that could unload the dishes, for instance, we'd want to make sure it doesn't break the wine glasses in the process. But we'd also want the robot to grip the stock pot without dropping it."
The "e-skin" made by Professor Javey's team comprises a matrix of nanowires made of germanium and silicon rolled onto a sticky polyimide film.
The team then laid nano-scale transistors on top, followed by a flexible, pressure-sensitive rubber.
A different approach was taken by a team led by Zhenan Bao, a Chinese-born associate professor at Stanford University in California.
Professor Bao's team's approach was to use a rubber film that changes thickness due to pressure and employs capacitors, integrated into the material, to measure the difference. It cannot be stretched, though.
"Our response time is comparable with human skin, it's very, very fast, within milliseconds, or thousandths of a second," Professor Bao said.
"That means in real terms that we can feel the pressure instantaneously."
The achievements are "important milestones" in artificial intelligence, commented John Boland, a nanoscientist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, who hailed in particular the use of low-cost processing components.
This advancement in artificial intelligence will not only improve upon the already existing ability of robots to act as housekeepers and house sitters but also introduce robots as much more profound substitutes such as babysitters, friends and even lovers.
In the search to substitute the human senses with electronics, good substitutes now exist for sight and sound, but lag for smell and taste. This obstacle, however, will hopefully be overcome in the near future.
Touch, though, is widely acknowledged to be the biggest obstacle and this just may just have also been overcome.
Professor Bao added important caveats about the challenges ahead.
One is about improving the new sensors. They respond to constant pressure, whereas in human skin more complex sensations are possible.
This is because the pressure-sensing cells in the skin can send different frequencies of signal — for instance, when we feel something painful or sharp, the frequency increases, alerting us to the threat. The ability to feel pain is also believed to be somewhat of a learning curve, teaching Robots, to some extent, what is safe and what is not, again improving upon the abilities of the NBR-114 profoundly.
In addition, Professor Bao warned: "Connecting the artificial skin with the human nerve system will be a very challenging task.
"Ultimately, in the very near future, we would like to make a skin which performs really like human skin and to be able to connect it to nerve cells on the arm and thus restore sensation.
"Initially, the prototype that we envision would be more like a handheld device, or maybe a device that connects to other parts of the body that have skin sensation.
"The device would generate a pulse that would stimulate other parts of the skin, giving the kind of signal 'my (artificial) hand is touching something', for instance."
In the future, artificial skin will be studded with sensors that respond to chemicals, biological agents, temperature, humidity, radioactivity or pollutants.
"This would be especially useful in applications where we want to send robots into environments, including space, where it could be dangerous for humans to go," said Professor Bao.
"They could collect information and send it back."
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/robotics-breakthrough-scientists-make-artificial-skin/story-e6frfro0-1225920548036#ixzz0zSdN6ysc
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