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This thin robotic skin looks like could have been flayed straight from an octopus. As it warps, bends, and stretches to five times its original size, it senses pressure and makes a rainbow of different colors of light. Metal men be damned—this is the new future of robots.

Unveiled today by a team of scientists at Cornell University and the Italian Technology Institute in Pontedera, Italy, the new luminescent robotic skin is made from various types of specialized silicone and is soft to the touch. The scientists say it could one day be used in designing anything from camouflaged soft robots to wearable electronic screens. The research is outlined today in the journal Science, and was funded in part by the research wings of the Army and Air Force.

"Soft robots themselves have a great potential for human-robot interaction, because they're much safer and feel nice," says Robert Shepherd, the Cornell University roboticist who headed the research effort. "This skin could allow soft robots to make themselves more or less visible in their environment, or colorize themselves to appear more friendly or aggressive. Those are traits we'd borrow directly from the octopus."

"You could imagine taking your smartphone out of your pocket and being able to stretch it into a much larger tablet"

Three-Layered Approach

The soft robotic skin may be futuristic, but it's not all that complicated. Bryan Peele, a mechanical engineer on the project, breaks it down into three main layers. Each layer is cleverly tweaked type of silicone, which keeps the skin as a whole flexible, able to stretch to roughly 500 percent its original size.

"Starting with the middle layer, basically we took some simple phosphorescent powders (which have been in car dashboards since the '50s) and mixed them into silicone, so that under a high electric field the material would glow," says Peele. The color of this glowing layer can be changed by adding touches of different elements—magnesium creates a yellow light, copper a blue-tinted one. "So now we have this cool, glowing material with the properties of silicone," he continues. "But to power it we need to sandwich it between another material that's [electrically] conductive, able to stretch, and is also transparent enough to let the glowing layer's light through."

That's where the researchers got lucky. In the past few years a team of Harvard researchers developed a silicone hydrogel material that fit this bill. Peele and his colleagues used a modified version of it.

Peele goes on: "Lastly, because these two materials are running at a really high voltage, you need an insulating outside layer of silicone so that you could pull and stretch the whole material with your hands" without being harmed. This was done with a relatively tough but stretchy silicone. Sandwich all three materials together and, boom, you've got yourself some glowing robotic octopus skin.

Because the electric field running through the glowing layer of the robotic skin is altered as you pull and squeeze the material, the skin actually glows a bit more as it stretches. And by monitoring the changing electric field (technically the capacitance) of this glowing material as it is stretched, the scientists can actually use the glowing patches as highly sensitive pressure sensors.

"You can design it to detect very light touches or very strong deformations. It's highly tunable," Shepherd says.

Beyond Camouflaged Robots

To be sure, this first incarnation of a brand new technology has a few kinks that need to be worked out. Shepherd notes that while his team can currently form a display of a few dozen colorized squares on a fist-sized flap of the skin, that's nowhere near the computer-screen-level resolution they hope to achieve. There are more immediate hurdles that need to be surmounted, too.

"Basically, in hot, dry environments this material can dry out," says Chris Larson, another scientist with the team. The problem is that "inside this skin you basically have a material that's a lot like human mucus."

Peele, Shepherd and their colleagues are still unflappably excited about the wide-ranging potential for glowing soft robotic skin, even beyond robots themselves. If the scientists to achieve that super high resolution, then you could imagine portable electronics like smartphones, made of this type of soft material. "You could imagine taking your smartphone out of your pocket and being able to stretch it into a much larger tablet," he says.

"Heck, you could coat your car with it."

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