Indian-origin scientist creating robotic hand with a human sense of touch

London: An Indian-origin scientist working on creating a robotic hand covered in so-called brainy skin that mimics the human sense of touch has won 1.5 million pounds in funding for the project.

Professor Ravinder Dahiya, Professor of Electronics and Nanoen-gineering at the University of Glasgow’s School of Engineering, said the futuristic thinking skin concept is inspired by the elements of real skin. The super-flexible, hypersensitive skin may one day be used to make more responsive prosthetics for amputees, or build robots with a sense of touch.

Brainy Skin is critical for the autonomy of robots and for a safe human-robot interaction to meet emerging societal needs such as helping the elderly, said Dahiya.

Along with his Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) te-am, the scientist has plans to develop ultra-flexible, synthetic “Brai-ny Skin” that thinks for itself.

Brainy Skin reacts like human skin, which has its own neurons that respond immediately to touch rather than having to relay the whole message to the brain.

This electronic thinking skin is made from silicon-based printed neural transistors and graphene an ultra-thin form of carbon that is only an atom thick, but stronger than steel.

The new version in the making is said to be more powerful, less cumbersome and would work better than earlier prototypes.