by Caleb Escobedo, Kandai Watanabe, and Ander Aranburu, on April 22, 2020
Flexible Whole-Body Artificial Skin for Collaborative Robotics
Robots have been steadily transitioning into human-populated environments and replacing physical separation from humans with complex perception and control software.
However, current safety–oriented solutions are computationally expensive, prone to occlusion, and require a significant setup overhead.
Robots are in need of compact, self-contained sensing of nearby space to guarantee safety at all times, improve perception, and afford rich interactions with their environment and people.
In this work, we present the first novel prototype of a flexible artificial skin for collaborative robotics equipped with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and proximity sensing.