NRI: INT: SMART: Soft Multi-Arm RoboT for Synergistic Collaboration with Humans

AbstractThis补助金将支持研究，将有助于新的方法有关的多臂软机器人，推进其实际应用中涉及与人类的密切合作。软机器人在涉及与人类交互的多功能应用中具有很大的前景，例如老年人护理，协作手术，工作/生活辅助和协作水果收获。以苹果采摘作为一个激励性的案例研究，本项目的目标是开发一种新型的软机器人系统，配备了多个软臂，称为软多臂机器人或智能，并推进其在涉及与人类密切合作的应用中的实际应用。该奖项支持基础研究，解决软机器人设计和制造，运动规划和控制，环境和人类感知以及人机交互方面的主要挑战。新的设计和方法将使多个软机器人手臂和人类之间能够安全，高效和强大的合作。软多臂机器人系统不仅可以提高生产效率（例如，帮助水果收获），而且还有助于满足国家对照顾老年人口的迫切需求（例如，老年人护理和辅助生活）。因此，这项研究的结果将有利于美国的经济和生活质量。该研究涉及多个学科，包括软机器人，控制，人机交互，感知和学习以及农业自动化。多学科方法还促进了研究中代表性不足的群体的参与，并对工程教育产生了积极影响。预计软多臂机器人系统将提供灵活性，效率和本质安全性，并实现与人类的生产性合作，具有一系列令人兴奋的潜在应用。为了实现这一目标，五个协同研究的重点是追求克服关键的科学挑战：1）设计和制造柔性多臂机器人，以实现同时驱动和刚度转向，并使灵巧的操作，2）改进这些柔性机器人的运动规划和控制方法，以实现在存在静止和动态障碍物的3D空间中的鲁棒操作，3）形式化基于信任的人机交互，以通过在软多臂机器人策略中显式地容纳人类信任的动态来实现有效的人机协作，4）开发果园和人类运动感知算法，以鲁棒地获得3D树和人类位置/姿势信息，以支持水果收获应用，以及5）在协作苹果收获的背景下，通过广泛的实验室和现场实验来评估软多臂机器人系统。总的来说，这些研究工作的进展有望使软多臂机器人切实可行，特别是在涉及与人类密切合作的应用中。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

AbstractThis grant will support research that will contribute novel methodologies related to multi-arm soft robots, advancing its practical use in applications involving close collaboration with humans. Soft robots have great promise in versatile applications involving interactions with humans, such as elder care, collaborative surgery, work/life assistance, and collaborative fruit harvesting. Taking apple-picking as a motivating case study, the goal of this project is to develop a novel soft robot system equipped with multiple soft arms, termed soft multi-arm robot or SMART, and to advance its practical use in applications involving close collaboration with humans. This award supports fundamental research that addresses the major challenges in soft robot design and fabrication, motion planning and control, environment and human perception, and human-robot interaction. The new designs and methodologies will enable safe, efficient, and robust cooperation between multiple soft robot arms and humans. The soft multi-arm robot system can not only improve production efficiency (for example, in assisting fruit harvesting), but also contribute to meeting the nation’s urgent need to take care of the elderly population (for example, in elder care and assisted living). Therefore, results from this research will benefit the U.S. economy and life quality. This research involves several disciplines including soft robotics, control, human-robot interaction, perception and learning, and agriculture automation. The multi-disciplinary approach also facilitates the participation of underrepresented groups in research and positively impacts engineering education.The soft multi-arm robot system is expected to offer dexterity, efficiency, and intrinsic safety, and achieve productive collaboration with humans with an array of exciting potential applications. To achieve this goal, five synergistic research thrusts are pursued to overcome key scientific challenges: 1) designing and fabricating soft multi-arm robots to realize simultaneous actuation and stiffness-turning and enable dexterous manipulation, 2) advancing motion planning and control approaches for these soft robots to achieve robust manipulation in 3D space in the presence of stationary and dynamic obstacles, 3) formalizing trust-based human-robot interaction to realize efficient human-robot collaboration by explicitly accommodating the dynamics of human trust in the soft multi-arm robot policy, 4) developing orchard and human motion perception algorithms to robustly obtain 3D tree and human position/pose information to support the fruit harvesting application, and 5) evaluating the soft multi-arm robot system via extensive lab and field experiments in the context of collaborative apple harvesting. Collectively, advances from these research endeavors are expected to make soft multi-arm robots practically viable, especially for applications involving close collaboration with humans.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.