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Synthetic Skins with Humanlike Warmth

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6414))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social Robotics Laboratory (Interactive and Digital Media Institute), and Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

    John-John Cabibihan, Rangarajan Jegadeesan, Saba Salehi & Shuzhi Sam Ge

Authors
  1. John-John Cabibihan
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  2. Rangarajan Jegadeesan
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  3. Saba Salehi
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  4. Shuzhi Sam Ge
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Social Robotics Lab, Interactive Digital Media Institute, and Edutainment Robotics Lab Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  2. Institute for Infocomm Research, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, 119613, Singapore

    Haizhou Li

  3. National University of Singapore, Singapore

    John-John Cabibihan

  4. Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star),, 1 Fusionopolis Way, #08-05, Connexis (South Tower), Singapore

    Yeow Kee Tan

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cabibihan, JJ., Jegadeesan, R., Salehi, S., Ge, S.S. (2010). Synthetic Skins with Humanlike Warmth. In: Ge, S.S., Li, H., Cabibihan, JJ., Tan, Y.K. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6414. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17248-9_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17248-9_38

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17247-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17248-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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