New robotic skin turns everyday objects into robots

If you ever wanted your stuffed toy to walk around, scientists have now made it possible by developing a robotic skin, able to turn any object into a robot.

Yale University roboticist Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio along with her team has created a robotic skin, which is actually a flexible material that can animate any inanimate object with the help of sensors and actuators.

The material, dubbed as ‘OmniSkin’, is made up of sheets of elastic embedded with sensors and actuators that when stuck to, wrapped around, or layered can make about any inanimate object move. The skin can be fixed in place through zips or other usual ties. The material is also modular because of which each of its small sheet can be attached to any other in variety of ways, reported The Verge.

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“[They’re] like Legos. They can be combined, separated, and re-combined in different patterns,” Kramer-Bottiglio told Smithsonian.com.

The team described the material described in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics. They showed how OmniSkin can be used in different ways including turning foam arms into a robotic grabbing claw, augmenting human clothing, constructing free-standing objects, and even making a stuffed toy walk by wrapping sheets of OmniSkin around a toy horse’s legs to make it move.

Video Courtesy: YaleCampus

However, what should be kept in mind is that OmniSkin is limited to be stuck onto an object that is flexible. “If you wrap the robotic skins around an object that is too stiff, nothing will move. We recommend that users just try different combinations and see what happens,” she said.

The design was inspired by a solicitation from NASA, which was looking for new soft robotics that might be beneficial in space, which is why OmniSkin is lightweight and reusable. “Future astronauts exploring another planet could quickly construct a robot using the robotic skins wrapped around whatever deformable materials they have access to and stick a camera on it, and then deploy the robot for exploration of small or dangerous spaces,” explained Kramer-Bottiglio.

For the future, Kramer-Bottiglio is excited to see how different people will utilize the skin, “I’m really excited to see what other people will do with robotic skins. The possibilities are endless.”