Welcome to Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.

Future Technologies are always to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast.

Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.

We're just around the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing,

blockchain, virtual reality, and more.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech podcast.

I have two super interesting guests, Carmel Mahidi, is a professor and Eric Merck Vicka, a PhD candidate candidate at Carnegie Mellon. We're going to be talking about a robotic skin they've made that heals itself. So how are you guys doing? Doing pretty good. Yeah, it's been great. Yeah, nice for having us. Yeah, I saw just a really brief article on the work you guys are doing, and it looks fascinating. So, you know, would you let listeners know what is it that you're working on?

Tell me about it in brief.

Yeah, so this is a material that we recently developed in my lab.

It was a project that Eric worked on with Mike Bartlett, another former lab member who's now a professor at Iowa State.

And this builds on a few years of effort on trying to create new types of,

if you think about an artificial skin and artificial nervous tissue to make robots more lifelike.

So I'll let Eric kind of, you know, get into the material itself.

So, yes, this robotic skin is composed of liquid metal microd droplets embedded inside of a

silicon elastomer. The skin has some unique properties where it has this kind of negligible

electro-mechanical coupling. So as you stretch it, it's a very negligible increase in resistance.

The other thing that's really unique is as this material encounters damage,

it's capable of automatically reconfiguring the electrical circuit without loss of functionality.

Yeah, so you can kind of think about this robotic material, like a soft rubbery circuit.

And when we stretch the material, it kind of preserves those circuit properties.

And because of these liquid droplets that are inside the rubber, that gives it this property that when you say, cut or rupture the circuit wiring, the little droplets, they kind of burst

and they create a new conductive pathways around those damaged areas.

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