  The artificial hands for sociable robotics and prosthetics are expected to be
touched by other people. Because the skin is the main interface during the
contact, a need arises to duplicate humanlike characteristics for artificial
skins for safety and social acceptance. Towards the goal of replicating
humanlike social touch, this paper compares the skin compliance, conformance
and hysteresis of typical robotic and prosthetic skin materials, such as
silicone and polyurethane, with the published biomechanical behaviour of the
human fingertip. The objective was achieved through materials characterization,
finite element (FE) modeling and validation experiments. Our initial attempt
showed that the selected types of silicone and polyurethane materials did not
exhibit the same qualities as the human fingertip skin. However, the
methodologies described herein can be used to evaluate other materials, their
possible combinations or other fingertip design configurations
