Japanese boffins invent a sensitive robot nurse

ONE PROBLEM HAS LONG troubled Japanese bio-mechanics, as they seek robotic solutions to the challenge of caring for an increasingly elderly population.

Those robots are clumsy. The last thing you need is Robonurse crushing a vulnerable patient’s grapes, because she doesn’t know her own strength.

Now the inscrutable boffins at Tokyo University may have solved the problem. With some help from Matsushita Electric Industrial, insists www.Nikkei.net (sub required).

Together they have developed a tiny sensor that can detect pressure and friction as sensitively as any human’s skin.

We thought this might depend which human. Doesn’t Steve Balmer have the hide of a rhinocerous? And the Aris to match, we wonder.

Anyhow, the sensors would be installed in the hands of robo-nurse. The idea is they can hold fragile items safely and touch people more gently. The research team led by university Professor Isao Shimoyama, is aiming for a sensitive, but robustly-commercial, nursing product on the market in a couple of years.

Robots, according to Nikkei, already carry out limited nursing care work and household chores.

The rice-grain sized sensor is made of silicon that is processed using MEMS (micro electro mechanical system) nanotechnology and is coated in rubber. On contact with the patient’s grapes (or any other pressure sensitive object or organ) a portion of the silicon vibrates or is distorted. These movements transmit electric signals, which measure the pressure exerted and friction produced. It works on objects weighing as little as a gram. It doesn’t matter how shrivelled your plums are, Robonurse won’t squeeze your pips out.

Previously, conventional tactile sensors were several square centimetres large. This made them too large to be installed in the fingertips of a robot. Imagine how painful if would be if it were changing your catheter!

Now the developers claim that the tiny sensor can be embedded under the surfaces of robot fingers, just like human nerves. µ