Future Cars Will Have Sprayed “Skin” on Their Surface to Detect Damage

Engineers at BAE Systems, a British multinational defense, security and aerospace company, are developing a “smart skin” concept which would literally be sprayed on aircraft and all sorts of vehicles. A project still in development, it’s meant to enable detection of injury or damage and the ability to “feel” the world around them.
Some petrol-heads we know actually refer to their cars as to actual human beings. There are even folks out there that name their four-wheeler and sometimes take better care than they do with their own dog. Well, BAE Systems is definitely not doing scientific research for them.

Engineers at BAE's Advanced Technology Centre are investigating a “smart skin” concept which could be embedded with tens of thousands of micro-sensors. The company claims that, when applied to an aircraft, this will enable it to sense wind speed, temperature, physical strain and movement, far more accurately than current sensor technology allows.

The best part is that the tiny sensors or “motes” could be as small as grains of rice and even as small as dust particles sizing less than 1mm squared. According to the engineers, collectively, the sensors would have their own power source and when paired with the appropriate software, would be able to communicate in much the same way the human skin sends signals to the brain. Being so small they could even be sprayed on the surface of the vehicle.

Like all these, apparently crazy, ideas that eventually turn out to be ground-braking discoveries, the leader of the project Senior Research Scientist Lydia Hyde claims to have had the “eureka” moment when she was doing her washing. She observed that her tumble dryer uses a sensor to prevent if from overheating.

Even though scientists are developing the technology primarily for the use of airplanes, it could eventually have wider civilian applications, such as cars and other vehicles.

Lydia said: “Observing how a simple sensor can be used to stop a domestic appliance overheating, got me thinking about how this could be applied to my work and how we could replace bulky, expensive sensors with cheap, miniature, multi-functional ones. This in turn led to the idea that aircraft, or indeed cars and ships, could be covered by thousands of these motes creating a ‘smart skin’ that can sense the world around them and monitor their condition by detecting stress, heat or damage.”