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Electronic Skin
Electronic skin refers to flexible, stretchable and self-healing electronics that are able to mimic functionalities of human or animal skin. The broad class of materials often contain sensing abilities that are intended to reproduce the capabilities of human skin to respond to environmental factors such as changes in heat and pressure. Advances in electronic skin research focuses on designing materials that are stretchy, robust, and flexible. Research in the individual fields of flexible electronics and tactile sensing has progressed greatly; however, electronic skin design attempts to bring together advances in many areas of materials research without sacrificing individual benefits from each field. The successful combination of flexible and stretchable mechanical properties with sensors and the ability to self-heal would open the door to many possible applications including soft robotics, prosthetics, artificial intelligence and health monitoring. Recent advances in the field of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flexible Electronics
Flexible electronics, also known as ''flex circuits'', is a technology for assembling electronic circuits by mounting electronic devices on flexible plastic substrates, such as polyimide, PEEK or transparent conductive polyester film. Additionally, flex circuits can be screen printed silver circuits on polyester. Flexible electronic assemblies may be manufactured using identical components used for rigid printed circuit boards, allowing the board to conform to a desired shape, or to flex during its use. Manufacturing Flexible printed circuits (FPC) are made with a photolithographic technology. An alternative way of making flexible foil circuits or flexible flat cables (FFCs) is laminating very thin (0.07 mm) copper strips in between two layers of PET. These PET layers, typically 0.05 mm thick, are coated with an adhesive which is thermosetting, and will be activated during the lamination process. FPCs and FFCs have several advantages in many applications: * Tightly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biosensor
A biosensor is an analytical device, used for the detection of a chemical substance, that combines a biological component with a physicochemical detector. The ''sensitive biological element'', e.g. tissue, microorganisms, organelles, cell receptors, enzymes, antibodies, nucleic acids, etc., is a biologically derived material or biomimetic component that interacts with, binds with, or recognizes the analyte under study. The biologically sensitive elements can also be created by biological engineering. The ''transducer'' or the ''detector element'', which transforms one signal into another one, works in a physicochemical way: optical, piezoelectric, electrochemical, electrochemiluminescence etc., resulting from the interaction of the analyte with the biological element, to easily measure and quantify. The biosensor reader device connects with the associated electronics or signal processors that are primarily responsible for the display of the results in a user-friendly way. This ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smart Materials
Smart materials, also called intelligent or responsive materials, are designed materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli, such as stress, moisture, electric or magnetic fields, light, temperature, pH, or chemical compounds. Smart materials are the basis of many applications, including sensors and actuators, or artificial muscles, particularly as electroactive polymers (EAPs). Terms used to describe smart materials include shape memory material (SMM) and shape memory technology (SMT). Types There are a number of types of smart material, of which are already common. Some examples are as following: * Piezoelectric materials are materials that produce a voltage when stress is applied. Since this effect also applies in a reverse manner, a voltage across the sample will produce stress within sample. Suitably designed structures made from these materials can, therefore, be made that bend, expand or contract ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emerging Technologies
Emerging technologies are technologies whose development, practical applications, or both are still largely unrealized. These technologies are generally new but also include older technologies finding new applications. Emerging technologies are often perceived as capable of changing the status quo. Emerging technologies are characterized by radical novelty (in application even if not in origins), relatively fast growth, coherence, prominent impact, and uncertainty and ambiguity. In other words, an emerging technology can be defined as "a radically novel and relatively fast growing technology characterised by a certain degree of coherence persisting over time and with the potential to exert a considerable impact on the socio-economic domain(s) which is observed in terms of the composition of actors, institutions and patterns of interactions among those, along with the associated knowledge production processes. Its most prominent impact, however, lies in the future and so in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soft Robotics
Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics that concerns the design, control, and fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials, instead of rigid links. In contrast to rigid-bodied robots built from metals, ceramics and hard plastics, the compliance of soft robots can improve their safety when working in close contact with humans. Types and designs The goal of soft robotics is the design and construction of robots with physically flexible-bodies and electronics. Sometimes softness is limited to part of the machine. For example, rigid-bodied robotic arms can employ soft end effectors to gently grab and manipulate delicate or irregularly shaped objects. Most rigid-bodied mobile robots also strategically employ soft components, such as foot pads to absorb shock or springy joints to store/release elastic energy. However, the field of soft robotics generally leans toward machines that are predominately or entirely soft. Robots with entirely soft bodies have tremendous potenti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sensitive Skin (electronic Device)
Sensitive skin, also known as sensate skin or electronic skin (e-skin), is an electronic sensing skin placed on the surface of a machine such as a robotic arm. The goal of the skin is to sense important environmental parameters—such as proximity to objects, heat, moisture, and direct touch sensations. Examples of a sensitive skin have been made by a group at the University of Tokyo led by Prof. Takao Someya. The group's work has been published in Nature, Science and Advanced Materials journals, as well as ''Proceedings of the (United States) National Academy of Sciences''. They have demonstrated pressure and temperature measurements at a resolution of a few millimeters, as well as organic transistors, organic solar cells, and organic light emitting diodes about 1 μm thick. The sensor arrays are based on many organic thin film transistors that are turned on one at a time and the current that flows through the sensor (electrical resistance-based) tells you how much pressure is be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robotic Sensing
Robotic sensing is a subarea of robotics science intended to give robots sensing capabilities. Robotic sensing mainly gives robots the ability to see,Roh SG, Choi HR (Jan 2009).3-D Tag-Based RFID System for Recognition of Object" IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering 6 (1): 55–65.Arivazhagan S, Ganesan L, Kumar TGS (Jun 2009).A modified statistical approach for image fusion using wavelet transform" Signal Image and Video Processing 3 (2): 137-144.Jafar FA, et al (Mar 2011).An Environmental Visual Features Based Navigation Method for Autonomous Mobile Robots" International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control 7 (3): 1341-1355. touch,Anderson S, et al (Dec 2010).Adaptive Cancelation of Self-Generated Sensory Signals in a Whisking Robot" IEEE Transactions on Robotics 26 (6): 1065-1076.Kim YM, et al (Aug 2010)A Robust Online Touch Pattern Recognition for Dynamic Human-robot Interaction" IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 56 (3): 1979-1987. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Tongue
The electronic tongue is an instrument that measures and compares tastes. As per the IUPAC technical report, an “electronic tongue” as analytical instrument including an array of non-selective chemical sensors with partial specificity to different solution components and an appropriate pattern recognition instrument, capable to recognize quantitative and qualitative compositions of simple and complex solutions Chemical compounds responsible for taste are detected by human taste receptors. Similarly, the multi-electrode sensors of electronic instruments detect the same dissolved organic and inorganic compounds. Like human receptors, each sensor has a spectrum of reactions different from the other. The information given by each sensor is complementary, and the combination of all sensors' results generates a unique fingerprint. Most of the detection thresholds of sensors are similar to or better than human receptors. In the biological mechanism, taste signals are transduced by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Nose
An electronic nose is an electronic sensing device intended to detect odors or flavors. The expression "electronic sensing" refers to the capability of reproducing human senses using sensor arrays and pattern recognition systems. Since 1982, research has been conducted to develop technologies, commonly referred to as electronic noses, that could detect and recognize odors and flavors. The stages of the recognition process are similar to human olfaction and are performed for identification, comparison, quantification and other applications, including data storage and retrieval. Some such devices are used for industrial purposes. Other techniques to analyze odors In all industries, odor assessment is usually performed by human sensory analysis, by chemosensors, or by gas chromatography. The latter technique gives information about volatile organic compounds but the correlation between analytical results and mean odor perception is not direct due to potential interactions between s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Muscle
Artificial muscles, also known as muscle-like actuators, are materials or devices that mimic natural muscle and can change their stiffness, reversibly contract, expand, or rotate within one component due to an external stimulus (such as voltage, current, pressure or temperature). The three basic actuation responses– contraction, expansion, and rotation can be combined within a single component to produce other types of motions (e.g. bending, by contracting one side of the material while expanding the other side). Conventional motors and pneumatic linear or rotary actuators do not qualify as artificial muscles, because there is more than one component involved in the actuation. Owing to their high flexibility, versatility and power-to-weight ratio compared with traditional rigid actuators, artificial muscles have the potential to be a highly disruptive emerging technology. Though currently in limited use, the technology may have wide future applications in industry, medicine, ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Cell
An artificial cell, synthetic cell or minimal cell is an engineered particle that mimics one or many functions of a biological cell. Often, artificial cells are biological or polymeric membranes which enclose biologically active materials. As such, liposomes, polymersomes, nanoparticles, microcapsules and a number of other particles can qualify as artificial cells. The terms "artificial cell" and "synthetic cell" are used in a variety of different fields and can have different meanings, as it is also reflected in the different sections of this article. Some stricter definitions are based on the assumption that the term "cell" directly relates to biological cells and that these structures therefore have to be alive (or part of a living organism) and, further, that the term "artificial" implies that these structures are artificially built from the bottom-up, i.e. from basic components. As such, in the area of synthetic biology, an artificial cell can be understood as a completely s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
California Institute Of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasionally referred to as "CIT", most notably in its alma mater, but this is uncommon. is a private research university in Pasadena, California. Caltech is ranked among the best and most selective academic institutions in the world, and with an enrollment of approximately 2400 students (acceptance rate of only 5.7%), it is one of the world's most selective universities. The university is known for its strength in science and engineering, and is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States which is primarily devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences. The institution was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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