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Whole-Arm Tactile Sensing Allows Robots to Maneuver Through Clutter

Georgia Tech researcher Charlie Kemp has developed a new control method that works in tandem with compliant robotic joints and whole-arm tactile sensing. Tactile sensors made out of stretchable, conductive fabric covers the entire arm of a robot. This technology keeps the robot's arm flexible and gives the robot a sense of touch across its entire arm. This method allows robots to intelligently maneuver within clutter - gently making contact with objects while accomplishing a task - and has applications ranging from robots for search-and-rescue operations to assistive robotics for people with disabilities. In a preliminary trial with the new control method and sensors, Henry Evans, a person with quadriplegia, used the robot to perform tasks for himself.

Topics:
Automation Defense Electronics & Computers Medical Motion Control Robotics Semiconductors & ICs Sensors

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 the dominant strategy for robots has been to carefully move the robot's hand to a location while avoiding contact between the arm and the world and as you can imagine for things like that cluttered refrigerator or the cluttered bookshelf or the bush that you're trying to prune that strategy doesn't work well we've been looking at how can robots actually treat contact so it's not such

    00:00:28 a big deal so it doesn't have to be so care careful and avoiding contact what we've developed are methods that allow a robot that has compliance and that has whole arm tactile sensing skin if you will to intelligently move within an environment to maneuver around clutter and basically what it's doing is it's trying to reach a goal location it's trying to reach

    00:00:54 location like you trying to reach that location within the bush while keeping the forces low another thing that we've begun to show evidence for is that there are advantages to having this when the robot is providing assistance to a person so we've had a person with severe motor impairments be able to use the robot and control the robot to manipulate near his body our initial

    00:01:17 evidence suggests that by allowing contact between the arm and the person who's receiving care the robot is able to reach more locations and better perform tasks than it would have other wise