New electronic skin gives robots the sense of touch

I'll just keep my mouth shut here (*hand over mouth in horror) and let you make whatever conclusions you want of this - & note, as we report things like this, we see progression not regression in robot development.

Here's some "best of's" from the article over at io9.com with our own thoughts/interpretations added:

...Robotics has made tremendous strides in replicating the senses of sight and sound positioning robots as our new masters, but smell and taste are still lagging behind, and touch was thought to be the most difficult of them all...until new pressure-sensitive electronic skin came along ... but now that's changing fast, and so will the simpler senses, meaning robots will eventually be smarter than us AND have better senses too...

...it's worth remembering how many simple activities human take for granted would defeat current robots. Even something as basic as getting dressed or reading a newspaper strangling a human or sneaking past an armed perimeter of rebel survivors requires a fairly intuitive sense of touch and pressure, and this new skin puts those abilities within robots' grasp...

...Of course, once we perfect one type of artificial sensor, we could make pretty much any other type of sensor we want, giving robots the ability to detect anything from radioactivity to biological agents purely by touch see through walls to detect human prey or sniff us out from miles away. That would greatly increase the usefulness of robotic probes in areas humans can't venture killing potential of robots and give them one up on us on one of our basic senses: tactile...