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Title: RobotSweater: Scalable, Generalizable, and Customizable Machine-Knitted Tactile Skins for Robots
Tactile sensing is essential for robots to perceive and react to the environment. However, it remains a challenge to make large-scale and flexible tactile skins on robots. Industrial machine knitting provides solutions to manufacture customiz-able fabrics. Along with functional yarns, it can produce highly customizable circuits that can be made into tactile skins for robots. In this work, we present RobotSweater, a machine-knitted pressure-sensitive tactile skin that can be easily applied on robots. We design and fabricate a parameterized multi-layer tactile skin using off-the-shelf yarns, and characterize our sensor on both a flat testbed and a curved surface to show its robust contact detection, multi-contact localization, and pressure sensing capabilities. The sensor is fabricated using a well-established textile manufacturing process with a programmable industrial knitting machine, which makes it highly customizable and low-cost. The textile nature of the sensor also makes it easily fit curved surfaces of different robots and have a friendly appearance. Using our tactile skins, we conduct closed-loop control with tactile feedback for two applications: (1) human lead-through control of a robot arm, and (2) human-robot interaction with a mobile robot.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1955444
NSF-PAR ID:
10488078
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
ISBN:
979-8-3503-2365-8
Page Range / eLocation ID:
10352 to 10358
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Location awareness Service robots Robot sensing systems Manipulators kin Surface fitting Sensors
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
London, United Kingdom
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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