E-whiskers: Will human technology finally catch up with cats?

Researchers have developed a set of  'e-whiskers,' highly sensitive tactile hairs that could someday help robots navigate tight spaces. 

|
Melanie Stetson Freeman / CSM
A cat's whiskers help them decide whether spaces are big enought to crawl through.

Equipped with whiskers, robots could soon get a better sense of their surroundings. 

Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley developed electronic whiskers from composite films of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles, according to a press release from the Berkeley Lab.

The carbon nanotube paste serves as an electrically conductive network matrix that can bend. To make the medium highly sensitive to pressure or any mechanical strain, a thin film of silver was loaded on it. As a result, the e-whiskers respond to a very small amount of pressure – as slight as a single Pascal, about the same pressure exerted on a table surface by a dollar bill, according to the press release.

"The strain sensitivity and electrical resistivity of our composite film is readily tuned by changing the composition ratio of the carbon nanotubes and the silver nano particles,"  said Ali Javey, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led the research."The composite can then be painted or printed onto high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers to form e-whiskers that can be integrated with different user-interactive systems."

The research group successfully used the electronic whiskers to demonstrate two- and three-dimensional mapping of wind flow.

Tactile hairs can be found throughout the animal kingdom. In cats, for example – whiskers help cats move around easily and gauge, as well as understand, their surroundings. Some animals also use them to monitor wind and navigate around obstacles in tight spaces, said Dr. Javey, who is also a  professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley

The e-whiskers come with a "highly responsive tactile sensor networks for real time monitoring of environmental effects," he said. 

The findings have a wide range of applications for advanced robotics, human-machine user interfaces, and biological applications, said Javey.

A paper on the research findings, titled “Highly sensitive electronic whiskers based on patterned carbon nanotube and silver nanoparticle composite films," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to E-whiskers: Will human technology finally catch up with cats?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0122/E-whiskers-Will-human-technology-finally-catch-up-with-cats
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe