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

NRI：具有主动传感网络的稳健且低成本的智能皮肤，可增强人机交互

• 批准号: 1528145
• 负责人: Fu-Kuo Chang
• 金额: $ 90万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2020-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1528145&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NRI; Robust; Low; Cost; Smart

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.

触觉在自然界中无处不在--可以说比视觉更重要。大多数动物身上有数千个皮肤感应器，用于触摸、温度等。但即使是最复杂的机器人，触觉感应器也相对较少，经过30年的研究，触觉感应器落后于计算机视觉。该项目旨在开发一种模仿人类皮肤的新型人造皮肤，它可以安装在任何提供丰富信息的“触觉”的机器手中。这项技术导致了极敏感的机器人皮肤的开发，具有前所未有的触觉感知能力。因此，这项工作实现了大量机器人应用，其中触觉感知至关重要，从机器人护理人员到医疗机器人和自主探索。该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。这一努力代表着赋予机器人在以人为中心的环境中执行任务所需的感知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，制造一种可以共形覆盖任意表面的多功能人造皮肤、实时诊断接触状态以及收集大量数据以实现高分辨率触觉传感，同时将功耗降至最低，仍然是关键问题。总体而言，这项工作从系统级别的角度解决了触觉感知问题。该方法涉及开发先进的制造技术，从利用非标准CMOS/MEMS/NEMS制造工艺到生产配备多模式微型传感器的低成本和坚固的人造皮肤。触觉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感知实验验证了该算法的有效性和性能评价。