What is it about a cat’s fur that makes us want to stroke it, and how do you create a rubbery grip that you just can’t resist squeezing? An artificial finger that can gauge a raft of tactile characteristics for materials should help to find out.
Cathy Barnes and colleagues at the University of Leeds, UK, are . To get the measure of how rough or smooth a material is, they place a sample on a pressure-sensitive platform and allow an attached motor to “stroke” the finger across it. Software then compares the sideways…
