This article is an installment of The Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.
This month, Stanford researchers brought us one step closer to artificial skin with embedded electronics that can flex and bend with the body.
Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her team of researchers at Stanford have spent nearly two decades trying to develop skin-like integrated circuits that can be stretched, folded, bent and twisted — working all the while — and then snap back without fail, every time. Such circuits presage a day of wearable and implantable products, but one hurdle has always stood in the way.
Namely, “How does one produce a completely new technology in quantities great enough to make commercialization possible?” Bao said. Bao and team think they have a solution. In a new study, the group describes how they have printed stretchable-yet-durable integrated circuits on rubbery, skin-like materials, using the same equipment designed to make solid silicon chips — an accomplishment that could ease the transition to commercialization by switching foundries that today make rigid circuits to producing stretchable ones.
Stanford researchers show how to print dense transistor arrays on skin-like materials to create stretchable circuits that flex with the body to perform applications yet to be imagined.
A team of researchers from the University of Maryland has 3D printed a soft robotic hand that is agile enough to play Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. — and win!
The feat, highlighted on the front cover of the latest issue of Science Advances, demonstrates a promising innovation in the field of soft robotics, which centers on creating new types of flexible, inflatable robots that are powered using water or air rather than electricity. The inherent safety and adaptability of soft robots has sparked interest in their use for applications like prosthetics and biomedical devices. Unfortunately, controlling the fluids that make these soft robots bend and move has been especially difficult—until now.
The key breakthrough by the team, led by University of Maryland assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ryan D. Sochol, was the ability to 3D print fully assembled soft robots with integrated fluidic circuits in a single step.
Using “soft robotics,” engineers at the University of Maryland built a prosthesis powered by water and air.
Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.
The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Posted in biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI
Once studied by Charles Darwin, the Venus flytrap is perhaps the most famous plant that moves at high speed. But as Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope explains, researchers are still unearthing new scientific insights into plant motion, which could lead to novel, bio-inspired robotic structures.
“In the absence of any other proof,” Isaac Newton is once said to have proclaimed, “the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” With 29 bones, 123 ligaments and 34 muscles pulling the strings, the human hand is indeed a feat of nature’s engineering. It lets us write, touch, hold, feel and interact in exquisite detail with the world around us.
To replicate the wonders of the human hand, researchers in the field of “soft robotics” are trying to design artificial structures made from flexible, compliant materials that can be controlled and programmed by computers. Trouble is, the hand is such a complex structure that it needs lots of computing power to be properly controlled. That’s a problem when developing prosthetic hands for people who have lost an arm in, say, an accident or surgery.
Humans are integrating with technology. Not in the future – now. With the emergence of custom prosthetics that make us stronger and faster, neural implants that change how our brains work, and new senses and abilities that you’ve never dreamed of having, it’s time to start imagining what a better version of you might look like.
From reality-enhancing implants to brain-controlled exoskeletons, breakthroughs in bio-tech have fuelled a new fusion of machinery and organic matter.
Cutting-edge technology enables people to “feel” with prosthetic limbs they move remotely with their brains.
It’s an astonishing achievement — and in an eyebrow-raising twist, Simons says he plans to live forever, by turning himself into a cyborg.
It sounds like Simons has thought out his plan.
“This is the first puzzle piece in my goal of replacing body parts with mechanical parts,” Simons told De Telegraaf, adding that his goal is “immortality.”
Over the past few decades, roboticists and computer scientists have developed artificial systems that replicate biological functions and human abilities in increasingly realistic ways. This includes artificial intelligence systems, as well as sensors that can capture various types of sensory data.
When trying to understand properties of objects and how to grasp them or handle them, humans often rely on their sense of touch. Artificial sensing systems that replicate human touch can thus be of great value, as they could enable the development of better performing and more responsive robots or prosthetic limbs.
Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University and Hanyang University in South Korea have recently created an artificial tactile sensing system that mimics the way in which humans recognize objects in their surroundings via their sense of touch. This system, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, uses sensors to capture data associated with the tactile properties of objects.
