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Electronic Skin Could Bring Touchy Robots
电子皮肤能让机器人产生触觉。
Our skin tells us about our surroundings by detecting temperature, pressure and other external conditions. If a pot handle is too hot to touch, we can feel this heat before burning our hand.
我们的皮肤通过探测温度，压力和其他外部状况告诉我们外界环境。如果锅把手太热，我们会在手被烫化之前感到热。
Robots may someday have this protection too. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a large-area sensor network integrated into a thin plastic film that acts like an electronic skin. They demonstrated the concept with an e-skin sample about the size of a postage stamp that lights up in the specific places it’s touched. The work is in the journal Nature Materials.
机器人也会在某天获得这种自我保护功能。加州大学伯克利分校的一群研究人员已经开发了一种类似于电子皮肤的薄薄的塑料布，上面分布着传感器网络。他们用一块电子皮肤样品向人们展示，样品也就一张邮票大小，被碰的地方会发光。这篇报告发表在《自然材料》杂志上。
The harder the e-skin gets pressed, the brighter the light.
电子皮肤受到的压力越大，光越亮。
The researchers envision that flesh and blood users could have an e-skin smart bandage that monitors wounds. A large sheet of the material covering the wall of a room could even operate like a display screen. And a robot with such a surface could more effectively interact with its environment.
研究人员展望说用血肉做实验的人员可以用智能电子皮肤贴检测受伤情况。一大张电子皮肤甚至可以当显示屏。具备电子皮肤的机器人能更有效的跟环境互动。
Of course, we don’t want our robots to be too sensitive. Then they might balk at cleaning up nuclear waste or spending years at a time all alone on Mars.
当然，我们不希望机器人太敏感了。要不然他们可能会犹豫去不去清理核废料，或者每次花费数年待在火星上。
—Larry Greenemeier
