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Sweater-Wrapped Robots Can Feel, React to Human Touch

RobotSweater, developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure. Once knitted, the fabric can be used to help the robot “feel” when a human touches it. Current industry solutions for detecting human-robot interaction look like shields and use very rigid materials that can’t cover the robot’s entire body because some parts need to deform. Learn more in this video.

“With RobotSweater, the robot’s whole body can be covered, so it can detect any possible collisions,” said Changliu Liu  , an assistant professor of robotics in the School of Computer Science.

Topics:
Automation Materials Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 00:00:04:07 - 00:00:28:06 Changliu Liu  I'm Changliu Liu, an assistant professor  in the Robotics Institute here at Carnegie   Mellon. And my main research area is on  robot safety and how to make robots safely   and efficiently collaborate with humans  in industrial environments. This is the   industrial robot that we are currently doing  research on. It is from Fanuc. It was usually   used in heavy-duty production lines doing  something like welding and heavy-duty tasks - 00:00:28:14 - 00:00:43:21 Changliu Liu  and usually they're put into the cages. There's a  huge shift of emphasis from massive production to   massive customization. We also want those robots  to be on flexible assembly lines so that they can   collaborate with humans to improve efficiency  and productivity in the final assembly..

    00:00:46 00:00:43:21 - 00:01:03:28 James McCann  So one of the cool things about this  project is this was a collaborative end   to end project where we did knitting  design, we did sensor calibration,   and we put the whole thing on a robot,  and that was all down to three different   faculty members and a whole host of  different students working together. 00:01:04:06 - 00:01:08:15 Wenzhen Yuan  In the tactile sensing community there has been a  longstanding demand of having a nice, large scale,   tactile skin to cover the very complicated surface  of multiple robots. Jim and I worked on designing   the sensor, calibrate the sensor, and then we  worked with Changliu to optimize the system. 00:01:21:11 - 00:01:27:03 James McCann 

    00:01:21 Can we take this technology - machine  knitting - and use it to make a sensor   which is suitable for deployment on robots? 00:01:27:03 - 00:01:33:13 Changliu Liu  and make the surface a sensor such that  we can sense the contact and the force? 00:01:33:21 - 00:01:53:00 Changliu Liu  I was like, Okay, that's a great idea. My  robot actually needs that! My student created   a very clever way to calibrate the skin  with respect to the robot. For each touch   will know what location it is on the skin.  And also we know what location it is on the   robot. Then we kind of map these two things  together. And also we can do this similarly   for the force calibration. And after that, we  can use the skin as a very powerful sensor.

    00:01:56 00:01:53:08 - 00:02:14:05 Bo Ying Su  Hi I'm Bo Ying Su I'm a Masters ECE student  here at CMU. The tactile skin is attached   to the robot. It allows us to interact with a  robot in a more natural way. The skin is being   calibrated to localize the contact and determine  the actual force that is applied on the skin. 00:02:14:19 - 00:02:22:03 Bo Ying Su  The skin can actually localize  where the human contact is,   and you can see it gives the  location and the pressure. 00:02:22:03 - 00:02:35:11 Changliu Liu  We can do this safety modification  of the trajectory - whenever there's   a touch in one direction, the robot cancels  out all the velocity in the other direction,  

    00:02:31 but still try to best continue to  follow the rest of the trajectory. 00:02:35:21 - 00:02:43:28 Wenzhen Yuan  There's a large potential of our sensors  to correlate not only to industrial   robots like Changliu is using, but also the  robots in other factories or the robots that   work with humans at home, in hospitals,  in a warehouse and generally everywhere. 00:02:43:28 - 00:03:03:27 James McCann  So this is an example of what can happen  when you have people with expertise in   the whole robotics pipeline. From the  fundamental materials, to electrical   design and characterization,  modeling, sensing and control. 00:03:04:04 - 00:03:13:25 James McCann 

    00:03:04 When everybody's working together, you can  have these very satisfying projects where you   go from a very small idea to really seeing  it on an actual robot proving out the idea.