NRI: Robust and Low-Cost Smart Skin with Active Sensing Network for Enhancing Human-Robot Interaction

触觉在自然界中无处不在，甚至可以说比视觉更重要。大多数动物的身体上有成千上万的皮肤传感器，用于触觉、温度等。但是，即使是最复杂的机器人也只有相对较少的触觉传感器，经过30年的研究，触觉感应落后于计算机视觉。该项目旨在开发一种模仿人类皮肤的新型人造皮肤，这种皮肤可以安装在任何机器人手中，提供丰富的信息“触觉”。这项技术导致了极其敏感的机器人皮肤的发展，具有前所未有的触觉感应能力。因此，这项工作使触觉感知至关重要的大量机器人应用成为可能，从机器人护理到医疗机器人和自主探索。这个项目中的方法可能会彻底改变未来机器人的设计方式，使其具有广泛的适用性。这一努力代表了赋予机器人在以人为中心的环境中执行任务所需的感官信息的一个重要里程碑。在智能手机行业的推动下，用于触摸传感的微处理器的出现，帮助解决了本地信息和通信处理的布线问题。然而，制造一种多功能人造皮肤仍然存在关键问题，该皮肤可以保形覆盖任意表面，实时诊断接触状态，并为高分辨率触觉传感收集大量数据，同时最大限度地降低功耗。总的来说，这项工作从系统级的角度解决了触觉感应。该方法涉及先进制造技术的开发，利用非标准CMOS/MEMS/NEMS制造工艺生产配备多模态微传感器的低成本和坚固的人造皮肤。触觉是通过一种创新的微接触传感技术实现的，该技术基于嵌入式传感器产生的超声波来识别局部接触/滑动情况。最后，通过一系列分级触觉实验验证了该方法的有效性和性能评价。

Tactile sensing is ubiquitous in nature - arguably even more essential than vision. Most animals have thousands of cutaneous sensors over their bodies for touch, temperature, etc. But even the most sophisticated robots have relatively few tactile sensors and, after 30 years of research, tactile sensing lags behind computer vision. This project aims at the development of a novel artificial skin mimicking the human skin that can be fitted into any robotic hand providing information-rich "sense of touch." This technology leads to the development of extremely sensitive robotic skins with unprecedented tactile sensing capabilities. As such, this work enables a plethora of robotic applications where tactile sensing is of utmost importance, ranging from robotic caregivers to medical robotics and autonomous exploration. The methodology in this project may revolutionize the way future robots are designed enabling their broad applicability. This effort represents a major milestone in endowing robots with the sensory information required to carry out tasks in human-centered environments.The advent of microprocessors for touch sensing, spurred by the smart phone industry, has helped to address the wiring problem with local processing of information and communication. However, there remain the critical problems of fabricating a multi-functional artificial skin that can conformally cover arbitrary surfaces, diagnosing in real-time, the contact state, and gathering a large amount of data for high-resolution tactile sensing, while minimizing power consumption. Overall, this effort addresses tactile sensing from a system-level point of view. The approach involves the development of advanced manufacturing technologies from leveraging nonstandard CMOS/MEMS/NEMS fabrication processes to produce a low-cost and robust artificial skin outfitted with multi-modal micro-sensors. The tactile sense of touch is achieved via an innovative micro-contact sensing technique based on ultrasound waves generated from embedded sensors to identify local contact/slip conditions. Finally, the validation and performance evaluation is demonstrated through a series of graded tactile sensing experiments.