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Researchers have covered robotic fingers with a new artificial skin that allows the hand to grasp fragile pencil lead and pull away from a needle before it punctures the covering. Both actions depend on more than sensitive sensors. The robot must also receive and interpret their signals quickly enough to respond.

Adding thousands of sensing points makes that harder, because more detailed touch information also means more data to read, transmit and process.

Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology in China and collaborating institutions tackled that bottleneck with a system inspired by the human sensory nervous system. Described in Nature Machine Intelligence, it reads more than 10,000 sensing elements 100 times a second and processes the information in stages.

Many artificial skins read their sensing points one after another. As the number grows, so do the delays. Nearby sensors can also interfere with one another, blurring the identification of where contact occurred.

The new skin combines flexible electrodes with a soft gel containing electrically charged particles. Pressure changes the electrical response where the gel meets the electrodes, allowing the system to measure touch signals.

To read many sensing points together, the researchers assigned them different signal frequencies within each sensor bundle. Similar to the way individual notes can be picked out of a chord, these signals can be separated even when they arrive together.

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