Curiosity Drives Research Activity – A Strong Desire to Know and Learn

This post is also available in: Japanese

Development of “E-skin” for robots as the second step

――How did you proceed after that?

Someya:At Bell Laboratories, I was researching how to produce electronic circuits of organic transistors on
plastic film using a stamping method. While I was studying there, a Bell Laboratories researcher successfully
developed a prototype of the world’s first electronic paper. This was really big news, but back then all research on flexible electronics was on display devices. Nevertheless, this gave me a great opportunity to transition to a new field and its challenges. After coming back to Japan, I began researching organic transistors jointly with Prof. Takayasu Sakurai at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science. Prof. Sakurai is one of the best-known Japanese researchers of silicon integrated circuit designs. He also had experience working in private industry and was an authority on reducing both the power consumption of silicon devices and the cost of circuit designs. Back then, it was said that circuits could be made inexpensively if printing was used.
Prof. Sakurai already knew the truth, which was that printing would not necessarily make circuits less expensive.
However, he has continued to identify other good reasons to use printing. Since the use of silicon allows a large number of transistors to be microfabricated on a small area, the cost per transistor is low. However, silicon is not good for making transistors sparsely on a large area. If you want to make circuits on a large area, printing has an advantage. It seemed possible that if we used printing on a film, it might be possible to produce flexible sensors over a large area.
Silicon would be unsuitable for this. I decided to begin research on developing such sensors. In the period from 2003 to 2004, I developed a prototype of E-skin, which feels similar to human skin and can be applied to robots. In 2005, TIME magazine featured this as a cover story. This was the second leap for me. E-skin has kept evolving, and
we are now developing sensors that can be applied not only to robots, but also to human skin. For the results of our latest research.

 

The next research step was hidden within failure

――What is your philosophy as a researcher?

Someya:I always try to make tasks enjoyable for myself and others. Research means doing something nobody has done before. Since there are naturally more failures than successes, it is extremely important for a researcher never to give up, even after failing, but to keep going and be very persistent. When things are not going well in research, it’s easy to get discouraged. However, the hint for the next step often lies precisely amidst the things that have not been going well. So even if you have failed, you need to learn from the failure and keep challenging the problem. This process is apt to be difficult, but we can devote ourselves to it if the subject is something we find interesting and we enjoy the process. If we genuinely enjoy something, we can keep doing it.
If you can convince yourself of how interesting it is, you will discover the spirit of research and the joy of trying to create something new. You will feel that the process is your life’s purpose. Then, you might become completely absorbed in the project. Research is something you cannot do unless you have this kind of fresh engagement and passion.
Curiosity–the strong desire to know and learn– is the main driving force behind research activities at universities.
In corporations, profitability as a business is required, but at universities, the researcher’s interest and curiosity are the starting point. Therefore, university research can sometimes lead to a discovery that would not be possible if one were only concerned about the market or business feasibility. From a corporate viewpoint, reaping the fruits of such research activities could lead to more academic-industrial collaboration.