The Device: The next step in artificial skin technology could owe its inspiration to beetle wings. Researchers looking to create a flexible sensor that detects mechanical force similar to the way skin senses touch were intrigued by microhairs on beetle wings that interlock when the beetle is at rest. “As one can imagine, a large interfacial contact is made during the interlocking, which is an excellent characteristic for a sensitive sensor,” study lead Kahp-Yang Suh of Seoul National University wrote in an email. With so much surface area in contact, a sensor relying on connections between nanofibers would be able to detect even minute perturbations that changed the fibers’ relative positions.
So Suh and his colleagues decided to copy the beetle wing design, building two nanofiber arrays laid on flexible silicon polymers and coating them with a thin layer of platinum. The result was a sensing system of interlocking platinum-covered ...
