Scientists have designed a pain-sensitive robot -

Geeko

In the animal kingdom, pain holds an important place.

It plays the role of an alarm which prompts the organism to react and protect itself against a stimulus interpreted as pain.

This ability to feel this type of sensation and to deduce an adapted behavior from it (removing one's hand from the fire, turning off the hot water, etc.), robots as we know and currently perceive them are not endowed with it, but that could change.

Researchers from the Technical University of Nanyang (Singapore) have indeed devised a system that would allow robots to feel pain, reports 01net.

The aim is not to make them perfect copies of human beings, but to enable them to identify “painful” and therefore potentially dangerous situations for them and to react accordingly.

Scientists have thus developed a new type of artificial skin equipped with “memtransistor” sensors.

These simulate memristors, i.e. passive electronic components that retain information due to the fact that their electrical resistance changes permanently when an electrical current is applied.

They are the ones who detect the stimuli.

They thus replace neurons and synapses.

A smart device

The robot's artificial skin is also equipped with artificial intelligence devices that allow it to interpret these stimuli as pain signals and to elicit an adequate reaction in real time.

The fact that these smart devices are placed near the memtransistor sensors makes the reaction to danger faster.

“Today's [robot] sensors typically don't process information, but send it to a single, large and powerful central processing unit where learning occurs,” the researchers report.

Making robots sensitive would make them more autonomous since they would be able to react in the event of danger.

They could thus remove their member which is being cut or burned, for example, and this, more quickly.

Finally, researchers at Nanyang Technical University have also developed an “ionic gel” which repairs some damage to the robot at the electronic level, a bit like in I, Robot.

The ionic gel developed for "sensitive" robots is similar to biological bodies that heal themselves after a small injury.

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