Technology Blog

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com The day dreamed up by Isaac Asimov in his novels has started to unfold, as robots have become one step closer to being better than man at the sense of touch. Researchers with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a robot finger called BioTac that is more sensitive to touch than the human hand, capable of identifying randomly selected material 85 percent of the time. The finger has a fingerprint on its "skin" that gives it more sensitivity to vibration than previous machines. It also has a soft coating similar to human tissue. The researchers wrote in the journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics that they were able to make BioTac distinguish 117 common materials gathered from fabric, stationary, and hardware stores. BioTac was rarely confused when trying to discern between pairs by similar textures that human subjects often were confused by. The robot finger has a tiny microphone inside called a hydrophone that is used to pick up vibrations. T