This smiling robot face made of living skin is absolute nightmare fuel

Giving robots a human-like exterior has been the norm for years, even centuries. But giving them real, living skin that can be manipulated into gruesome, gooey expressions? It’s new.

The new work, published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, is really just an experiment. This won’t be the face of your next smart home hub or vacuum.

But it may well be that the ingenious machinery produced by billions of years of evolution is better in some situations than artificial skin (also in full development) or simpler surfaces. This raises several questions – many, in fact, but only one is really the subject of the article, as befits any scientific inquiry.

Namely: how could such a surface of living tissue, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, attach to the mechanical foundation of a robot’s limb or “face”?

In humans and other animals, there is a network of ligaments that anchors the skin to the muscles and underlying tissues. It works pretty well, I found. And researchers at the University of Tokyo and Harvard wanted to test whether they could create a version of this system that would allow living skin to cling tightly to an artificial substrate and be manipulated in various directions without tearing or unintentional distortion.

How did their “dermis equivalent” turn out? I’ll let you be the judge:

Ah, nightmare fuel. But you can’t accuse him of being less than well hydrated.

Sure, it’s horrible now, but it’s not intended to be realistic or beautiful – just to illustrate a potential method of attaching living tissue to a robotic landing gear.

Yes, that’s exactly what a T-100 Terminator model offers, but let’s not go too far. Skin-covered robots could do all sorts of useful things besides infiltrating the past to destroy humanity’s future.

Cultured skin, as it is said, can self-heal, carrying biological sensors like ours to provide sensitive touch, and could also have benefits in medical or human interaction contexts.

But only if it can stay alive and be moved in the same way our own skin does on a daily basis. This is part of what the article is supposed to show: a working method for attachment and manipulation that could potentially be used on – or as – a face.