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Soft skin coverings and touch sensors have emerged as a promising feature for robots which might be each safer and more intuitive for human interaction, but they’re expensive and difficult to make. A recent study demonstrates that soft skin pads doubling as sensors made out of thermoplastic urethane could be efficiently manufactured using 3D printers.
“Robotic hardware can involve large forces and torques, so it must be made quite secure if it’ll either directly interact with humans or be utilized in human environments,” said project lead Joohyung Kim, a professor of electrical & computer engineering on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It’s expected that soft skin will play a crucial role on this regard since it will probably be used for each mechanical safety compliance and tactile sensing.
As reported within the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the 3D-printed pads function as each soft skin for a robotic arm and pressure-based mechanical sensors. The pads have airtight seals and connect with pressure sensors. Like a squeezed balloon, the pad deforms when it touches something, and the displaced air prompts the pressure sensor.
Kim explained, “Tactile robotic sensors normally contain very complicated arrays of electronics and are quite expensive, but now we have shown that functional, durable alternatives could be made very cheaply. Furthermore, because it’s just a matter of reprogramming a 3D printer, the identical technique could be easily customized to different robotic systems.”
The researchers demonstrated that this functionality could be naturally used for safety: if the pads detect anything near a dangerous area akin to a joint, the arm robotically stops. They may also be used for operational functionality with the robot interpreting touches and taps as instructions.
Since 3D-printed parts are comparatively easy and cheap to fabricate, they could be easily adapted to recent robotic systems and replaced. Kim noted that this feature is desirable in applications where cleansing and maintaining parts is dear or infeasible.
“Imagine you wish to use soft-skinned robots to help in a hospital setting,” he said. “They might have to be repeatedly sanitized, or the skin would have to be repeatedly replaced. Either way,there is a huge cost. Nevertheless, 3D printing is a really scalable process, so interchangeable parts could be inexpensively made and simply snapped on and off the robot body.”
Tactile inputs like the sort provided by the brand new pads are a comparatively unexplored facet of robotic sensing and control. Kim hopes that the benefit of this recent manufacturing technique will encourage more interest.
“Immediately, computer vision and language models are the 2 major ways in which humans can interact with robotic systems, but there may be a necessity for more data on physical interactions, or ‘force-level’ data,” he said. “From the robot’s standpoint, this information is essentially the most direct interaction with its environment, but there are only a few users — mostly researchers — who take into consideration this. Collecting this force-level data is a goal task for me and my group.
