Synthetic skins with humanlike warmth

Abstract

Synthetic skins with humanlike characteristics, such as a warm touch, may be able to ease the social stigma associated with the use of prosthetic hands by enabling the user to conceal its usage during social touching situations. Similarly for social robotics, artificial hands with a warm touch have the potential to provide touch that can give comfort and care for humans. With the aim of replicating the warmth of human skin, this paper describes (i) the experiments on obtaining the human skin temperature at the forearm, palm and finger, (ii) embedding and testing a flexible heating element on two types of synthetic skins and (iii) implementing a power control scheme using the pulse-width modulation to overcome the limitations of operating at different voltage levels and sources. Results show that the surface temperature of the human skin can be replicated on the synthetic skins. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.