Hang on to your Jimmy hats kids, human skin for robots has just been created in a lab somewhere in Japan, of course. OK, it's not real
skin, rather, a 1-cm thick film of elastic silicone covered by a 0.2-mm thick textured layer of firm urethane -- a dermis and epidermis, if you will -- which 10 out of 12 lonely robotics professors swear feels like the real deal. The artificial skin was developed primarily for cosmetics testing in a partnership 'tween Kao Corporation and a research team from Keio University led by Takashi Maeno. Yeah, right, cosmetics. With work already underway to make robots detect their owner's sweat and racing pulse
, well, we think it's pretty clear where this is all going, eh?