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Tactile Skin Supplier Map
Here's a handy reference for the suppliers who are making today's robots more tactile - better skin sensors.
(The three major layers of robotic touch)
• Fingertip sensing
GelSight uses vision-based tactile imaging. SynTouch, Robotiq, AIDIN Robotics, XELA Robotics and PaXini develop compact sensors for pressure, contact and high-density touch feedback.• Tactile skin and e-skin
Tacterion, Pressure Profile Systems, Tekscan Keli Sensing and Hanwei build flexible sensing surfaces that can cover fingers, palms and curved robot structures.• Integrated tactile hands
Shadow Robot and Tacterion combine dexterous hands with distributed tactile feedback for manipulation research and advanced robotic control.
Scientifiction great Ray Cummings describes super-sensitive robot fingers in his 1931 story The Exile of Time:
We had gone no more than a hundred feet or so when Migul [the robot] slowed our pace, and began to walk stooped over, with one of its abnormally long arms held close to the ground. The fingers were stiffly outstretched and barely skimmed the floor surface of the tunnel. As we passed through a spot of light I saw that Migul had extended from each of the fingertips an inch-long filament of wire, like finger nails.
('The Exile of Time' by Ray Cummings)Migul's fingers with the extended filaments were feeling it. What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot! Yet, in my own Time-world of 1935, it was all crudely presaged: this now before me was merely the culmination.
(Read more about sensitive robot fingers)
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