University of Nottingham Research Fellow Feng Zhou leads the Somabotics Soma Skins project.  He recently ran a 3-day workshop at the Cobot Maker Space for the Somabotics team and wider AI community to explore, experience and feedback on a Soma Skin prototype toolkit he has developed.

Feng explained “a Soma Skin is a fully wearable lego set for embodied interaction. Each skin comprises plug-and-play sensor and actuator tiles — such as pressure pads, stretch ribbons, micro-pumps, vibration motors, heat patches and more — that snap onto lightweight wireless nodes. Because every node runs ROS, the skins can exchange data with existing robot arms, mobile manipulators or cloud services straight out of the box.

On the software side, a drag-and-drop visual editor enables non-coders to link any live data stream — for example, a robot-joint velocity, a heartbeat sensor, or a remote user’s gesture — to any actuator behaviour within minutes. The result is an endlessly modular and re-configurable platform: researchers can swap hardware blocks to fit a dancer’s forearm today and a rehabilitation patient’s ankle tomorrow.

Looking ahead, the aim is for designers to be able to layer simple rules or integrate AI modules that learn a user’s preferred pressure rhythm and personalise the feel automatically. In short, Soma Skin turns sensing, actuation and robot coupling into a five-minute task, opening the door to rapid prototyping of soft-robot garments, remote haptic telepresence and AI-assisted somaesthetic experiences.”

The hope is that Feng’s Soma Skin toolkit can become a useful resource for future research both within the Somabotics Fellowship and external projects.

Zhou, F., Chamberlain, A., & Benford, S. (2025, June). AI and Intelligent Synthetic Skin: Advancing Beyond Human Skin for Sensory Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Poster presented at Third UK AI Conference 2025, London, UK