Science Magazine is reporting on a new sensor which should help robots achieve a humanlike sense of touch. It's a thin film that can be applied to nearly any surface. When the film touches something, it causes the material to light up. A camera can then record the lighting changes and use them to give highly accurate "touch" feedback.
The idea is to use such an interface for minimally invasive surgery: a small probe could feel inside the human body and determine, for example, whether a tumor is cancerous. But how do you get a camera in there to see what the sensor is feeling?
"There's something novel, something really good about this," says Richard Crowder, an electrical engineer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. "You put a film on your robotic finger, and you've got your signal." The challenge, he adds, is incorporating a camera into the fingertip. But Saraf says it should be possible to detect the current flowing through the film directly, obviating the camera.
Aha! So the key to getting robot touch-sense working hasn't actually been achieved yet. It's a good first step, but in order for this thing to be truly useful, we need to get rid of the camera.
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Possibly some sort of distributed "camera" would work? Single-pixel sensors, along the line of the insect-inspired compound cameras that were in the press recently? Put a layer of those behind this film, and you might have something. It might not be that expensive to produce, either...
Can't you wrap the film around a length of fibreglass or something, and make use of something like:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/