Robotic skins provide motion to everyday inanimate objects

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Inanimate objects can be turned into robots following the development of robotic skins, an advance with a range of potential applications such as search-and-rescue robotics or wearable technologies.

Developed in the lab of Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science at Yale University, robotic skins enable users to design their own robotic systems. The results of the team's work are published today in Science Robotics.

The skins are said to be made from elastic sheets embedded with sensors and actuators developed in Kramer-Bottiglio's lab. Placed on a deformable object the skins animate these objects from their surfaces. According to Yale, the makeshift robots can perform different tasks depending on the properties of the soft objects and how the skins are applied.

"We can take the skins and wrap them around one object to perform a task - locomotion, for example - and then take them off and put them on a different object to perform a different task, such as grasping and moving an object," she said. "We can then take those same skins off that object and put them on a shirt to make an active wearable device."

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