An artificial skin is helping a robot to recognise the difference between picking up inanimate objects and living sea creatures such as starfish and shellfish. That sense of touch could prove useful in cleaning up the ocean, doing underwater exploration or even carrying out deep-sea mining on the seafloor.
The artificial skin鈥檚 sense of touch harnesses what is known as the magnetoelastic effect 鈥� changes that occur in the magnetic field of materials as they are pushed and pulled. This phenomenon is unaffected by underwater conditions even after several weeks of immersion in a salty, sea-like environment, but had mainly been observed in rigid metals and metal alloys.
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues discovered the magnetoelastic effect can also occur in soft plastic-like materials called polymers. They then used this knowledge in the design and development of an artificial skin that includes an array of neodymium magnets to convert any physical touch into magnetic field changes, along with two sensing layers that convert the magnetic field alterations into electrical signals for interpretation.
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The researchers then attached the skin to a听robotic arm that practised randomly gripping four ocean creatures 鈥� a sea mollusc, a sea snail, a scallop and a starfish 鈥� along with ocean trash samples such as a bottle cap, a paper cup and a plastic bottle. An AI model trained on interpreting the sensor signals from the skin during the gripping exercises reached 95 per cent accuracy in recognising the different objects.
This touch-based AI-powered system is not computing intensive and can complement underwater robotic vision, says at the University of California, Los Angeles.
鈥淚n the early days of deep-sea robotics, I watched an expert operator attempt for 20 minutes to pick up a rock embedded in sediment with a manipulator on a teleoperated deep-sea vehicle,鈥� says at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. 鈥淯ltimately he didn鈥檛 succeed.鈥�
Improved touch sensitivity can help both human operators and more autonomous robotic vehicles to quickly accomplish underwater tasks such as grabbing objects, says Bellingham. That could save both time and money during expensive undersea operations.
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