4.8 Article

CoboSkin: Soft Robot Skin With Variable Stiffness for Safer Human-Robot Collaboration

Journal

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS
Volume 68, Issue 4, Pages 3303-3314

Publisher

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TIE.2020.2978728

Keywords

Robot sensing systems; Collision avoidance; Skin; Safety; Force; Human– robot collaboration (HRC); robot skin; safety; variable sensitivity; variable stiffness

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China [51975513]
  2. Major Research Plan of National Natural Science Foundation of China [51890884]
  3. Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China [LR20E050003]
  4. Zhejiang University Special Scientific Research Fund for COVID-19 Prevention and Control [2020XGZX017]
  5. Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51821093]
  6. Robotics Institute of Zhejiang University [K18-508116-008-03]
  7. China's Thousand Talents Plan Young Professionals Program

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The new collaborative robot skin (CoboSkin) enhances safety in human-robot collaboration by providing softness, variable stiffness, and sensitivity features. It is composed of inflatable and sensing units, with the ability to measure distributed contact force and adjust stiffness by varying air pressure.
Conventional industrial robots are unable to guarantee the inherent safety when working together with humans due to the use of rigid components and the lack of force sensation. To enhance the safety of human-robot collaboration (HRC), the new collaborative robot skin (CoboSkin) with the features of softness, variable stiffness, and sensitivity is designed and studied in this article. The CoboSkin is composed of an array of inflatable units and sensing units. The sensing units made of soft porous materials are capable of measuring distributed contact force in a real-time manner. By leveraging the foaming process, the sensing units are interconnected with inflatable units fabricated by the elastomer of which the deformation is limited by the textile wrapped around it. Variation of stiffness is enabled by adjusting the internal air pressure supplied to inflatable units, thereby changing the sensitivity of the sensing units and reducing the peak impact force. Soft porous materials endowed the CoboSkin with increased sensitivity, minimal hysteresis, excellent cycling stability, and response time in the millisecond range, which enabled sensing feedback for controlling a robot arm at different levels of stiffness. Finally, the validation of the CoboSkin for safer HRC was conducted with a robot arm to detect an unintended collision, illustrating its potential application in robotics.

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