Baths of human skin cells might sound like something straight out of a horror movie. But in reality, having a vat of skin at the ready allowed researchers to give a mechanical finger a layered covering that looks and acts much like human skin.
“Our goal is to develop robots that are truly human-like.” Shoji Takeuchi, a study coauthor and engineer at The University of Tokyo, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). On that front, the team succeeded, researchers in the field say. “This is very interesting work and an important step forward,” Ritu Raman, an MIT engineer not involved in the work, tells Science News.
To generate the skin, the researchers sunk the robotic digit in a blend of collagen and lab-grown dermal fibroblasts, a kind of human skin cells found in the dermis, the basal layer of human skin. Once a suitable layer of those cells had formed, ...
