Review of Robot Skin: A Potential Enabler for Safe Collaboration, Immersive Teleoperation, and Affective Interaction of Future Collaborative Robots

Abstract

The emerging applications of collaborative robots (cobots) are spilling out from product manufactories to service industries for human care, such as patient care for combating the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and in-home care for coping with the aging society. There are urgent demands on equipping cobots with safe collaboration, immersive teleoperation, affective interaction, and other features (e.g., energy autonomy and self-learning) to make cobots capable of these application scenarios. Robot skin, as a potential enabler, is able to boost the development of cobots to address these distinguishing features from the perspective of multimodal sensing and self-contained actuation. This review introduces the potential applications of cobots for human care together with those demanded features. In addition, the explicit roles of robot skin in satisfying the escalating demands of those features on inherent safety, sensory feedback, natural interaction, and energy autonomy are analyzed. Furthermore, a comprehensive review of the recent progress in functionalized robot skin in components level, including proximity, pressure, temperature, sensory feedback, and stiffness tuning, is presented. Results show that the codesign of these sensing and actuation functionalities may enable robot skin to provide improved safety, intuitive feedback, and natural interfaces for future cobots in human care applications. Finally, open challenges and future directions in the real implementation of robot skin and its system synthesis are presented and discussed.

Smart deployment of IoT-TelosB service care StreamRobot using software-defined reliability optimisation design

“…In summary, recent studies have justified the significance of ISCR, especially in collaborative sensing robots (cobots) [47] , [48] , [49] , [50] . Other new areas include IoT-telemedicine robots [51] , service robots [52] , companion cloud-based robots [53] , telepresence robots [54] , social care geriatric robots [55] , human-care robots [56] , [57] , telerobotics [58] , and social assistive robots [59] , [60] .…”

GuLiM: A Hybrid Motion Mapping Technique for Teleoperation of Medical Assistive Robot in Combating the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…This part of the score was based on the ratio (α = A overlap /A square ) of the overlapping area A overlap between the block and the baseline square, to the area of the baseline square A square . The final score of the placement precision of the second group S 2p was calculated with the scoring rules depicted below in (12).…”

“…Human-Cyber-Physical Systems (HCPS) in the context of new-generation healthcare provides in-depth integration of the operator and the robot, promoting the development of intelligent telerobotic systems [10], [11]. Well-developed isolation-care telerobotic systems may speed up the treatment process, reduce the risk of nosocomial infection, and free up the medical staff for other worthwhile tasks, providing an optimal strategy to balance escalating healthcare demands and limited human resources in combating the COVID-19 pandemic [12].…”

Bioinspired Co‐Design of Tactile Sensor and Deep Learning Algorithm for Human–Robot Interaction

“…[ 9,10 ] However, deploying bionic skins onto a large‐area surface of the robot is challenging due to the calibrations of numerous sensor units and the lack of algorithm–sensor co‐design for intelligent tactile sensing. [ 11 ]…”

“…[9,10] However, deploying bionic skins onto a large-area surface of the robot is challenging due to the calibrations of numerous sensor units and the lack of algorithm-sensor co-design for intelligent tactile sensing. [11] To bridge the gap between single-unit sensing and large-area sensing, significant efforts have been devoted to developing array-type bionic sensors, with sensing mechanisms ranging from capacitance, [12,13] and piezoresistance, [14] to optics, [15] and magnetism. [16] Their lattice arrangements of small-sized sensing Robots equipped with bionic skins for enhancing the robot perception capability are increasingly deployed in wide applications ranging from healthcare to industry.…”