Robot covered with “living” and realistic skin displays dimpled smile

A robot with soft, pink skin looks at the camera with glassy eyes before pulling its face into a dimpled smile.

While it may sound like something out of a nightmare, this tiny robot covered in living skin could represent a breakthrough in the quest to make robots more human-like. It’s the work of researchers in Japan, who say they’ve discovered a new way to bond living skin tissue to a mechanical robotic surface.

The team was led by Professor Shoji Takeuchi of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science. He previously developed a “living” robotic skin using collagen, a fibrous protein in human skin, and human dermal fibroblasts, the main cell type in connective tissue, that could be applied to a robotic finger and bend without breaking.

For their new technique, the team took inspiration from the natural structure of human skin ligaments to create “anchors” using a collagen gel applied to small V-shaped holes in the robot’s surface. The new method provides “a more continuous and durable attachment,” Takeuchi says.

Takeuchi is not alone in his efforts to make robots more human-like.

Ameca, often called “the world’s most advanced humanoid robot,” employs artificial intelligence to talk to people and react appropriately to their responses. One of the things that makes it look more realistic than other robots is its eyes, says Will Jackson, founder and CEO of Engineered Arts Ltd, the company behind Ameca.

“The eyes are the windows to the soul. We read each other’s emotions through eye contact,” Jackson told CNN earlier this year, adding that with a “finite amount of movement” available in the robot’s head, the eyes provide “the most expressive capability.”

Unlike the 3.5 million industrial robots already working behind the scenes in sectors such as auto and electronics manufacturing, humanoids like Ameca, or Hanson Robotics’ Sophia and Grace, are intended for human-interacting roles such as hospitality, healthcare or education.

Currently, they don’t have a wide range of motion for their facial expressions, creating a “strange valley” effect, a phenomenon that can make people uncomfortable with things that try to look human but fail to do so.

“Realistic facial expressions increase the robot’s ability to communicate and interact with humans more naturally and effectively,” says Takeuchi. “This is particularly important in applications like healthcare, where empathy and emotional connection can significantly impact patient care.”

Building robots that can feel

The research, details of which were published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science this month, is an exciting development for the field of robotics, says Yifan Wang, an assistant professor in the school of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Wang’s work focuses on “soft robots” that mimic biological creatures.

Skin, the largest organ in the human body, is vital for sensory perception, sensing temperature, humidity and textures of objects, Wang says. “This kind of feature in biological systems is currently, with artificial robots, still very difficult to achieve,” he adds.

But the research at the University of Tokyo enables a “hybrid solution” between the fields of soft and traditional robotics that is “very interesting,” Wang says. Robots are often covered in a material made to resemble flesh, such as silicone, that is attached via adhesive, which can cause the skin to fall off or break, Wang says.

The new method, on the other hand, offers a way to “adhere the skin to a hard surface very well, so that it doesn’t come off easily and forms a very good interface between the hard and the soft,” he says.

For Wang, the most exciting implications of this research revolve around developments in “robot sensing capabilities.”

“Our human skin has these very delicate, high-density sensors on the surface, which currently cannot be achieved with some synthetic materials,” Wang says. “(But) if we use biological skin on these traditional robots, we can achieve a similar type of sensing of different features.”

Takeuchi and his team hope to add more sensory functions in the next phase of their research, “to make the skin more responsive to environmental stimuli,” he says.

However, ensuring the consistency and quality of living skin may not be so easy, says Takeuchi.

So another part of his research is exploring how to create a robotic skin vascular system, with a network of vessels and veins that transport blood and lymphatic fluids throughout the body. This can provide the necessary supply of nutrients to maintain skin health over time. This would give the skin more moisture, “increasing its durability and longevity,” says Takeuchi.

Something like this “would need a lot of work in terms of engineering,” says Wang. But if they succeed, it would give humanoids the ability to look and feel like people in the future.

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