We know that robots can be handled automatically in warehouses. Using artificial intelligence they can beat chess masters, drive cars and catch up with humans in many ways. But the touch is a very delicate feeling, the robot does not do well in this respect.
For example, if a robot is going to disassemble a roadside bomb or how to deal with an egg carefully when making a fried egg, it needs to be able to sense exactly when the object is moving away from its control.
Until now, it has been difficult to accurately sense the vibrations and shear forces that occur in most robotic and prosthetic hands (a mechanical term, "cut" in a pair of closely spaced, horizontally oriented, For example, when the finger slides on the desktop or the object begins to fall, the external force, ie, the force perpendicular to the active surface, causes the relative cross-sectional deformation of the cross-section of the material along the direction of the external force.
Now, engineers from the University of Washington and UCLA have invented a "skin" with a sensor that can cover any part of the robot's body or prosthesis, with extensible stretchable properties that can be accurately sensed Information about shear forces and vibrations. And this information is crucial to successfully capturing and manipulating objects.
The skin described in the paper simulates stretching and compression of human fingers as they slide across the surface or in differentiating between different textures. It senses these haptic messages with keen awareness and achieves similar accuracy and sensitivity as human beings. This ability can greatly enhance the robots in many areas of competence, from surgery, industrial processes to clean the kitchen and so on.
Jonathan Posner, a professor of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering who is the author of the paper, said robotic arms and prostheses are now judged by visual information such as the robot visually identifying "is my hand gripped on this object?" Or "Is my hand touching the line?" This is clearly not quite complete.
From our daily experience we can see that our vision can see the whole picture of an object, but in the process of touching it, our hands will feel some new information, such as its detailed texture, softness of the material and so on, This is a visually hard to get information.
According to Posner, if a robot wants to demolish an improvised explosive device, it needs to know whether its hand is sliding along the wire or holding the wire. If the robot has a medical device in it, it needs to guide the object in the hand to slide. All of this requires the robot to sense the shear force. Currently, other sensor skins do not yet have this capability.
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