Over the past couple of decades, many people in and out of the science community have watched the steady progress being made in robotics. It’s an exceptionally interesting field due to the anthropomorphic nature of the results. Each new step brings such machines closer to emulating us even as we look forward to the next step. One interesting thing about robotics is that certain areas seem to be advancing faster than others. Robot arms for example are old news, new research is focused more on hand movements. And has advances in hand movements have been made, more research has come to focus on finger movements and finally tactile sensations. Now new work by a trio of researches from the National University of Singapore describe in their paper published on the preprint server arXiv, how affixing artificial fingerprints to robot fingers can increase tactile "sensation" allowing such a robot to discern the differences in curvature of objects.
