A force and thermal sensing skin for robots in human environments

Wade, Joshua; Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh; Williams, Robert C.; Kemp, Charles C.

doi:10.1016/j.robot.2017.06.008

Cited by 30 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Robots have been shown to benefit from thermal touch sensing, but results have yet to show how thermally ambiguous materials can be distinguished [12], [17], [18], [33], [34]. For a robot, distinguishing object materials can enhance manipulation capabilities and physical interaction with the world.…”

Section: B Robot Thermal Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Recognition via Heat Transfer Given Ambiguous Initial Conditions

Bhattacharjee

Clever

Wade

et al. 2021

IEEE Trans. Haptics

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Humans and robots can recognize materials with distinct thermal effusivities by making physical contact and observing temperatures during heat transfer. This works well with room temperature materials, yet research has shown that contact with distinct materials can result in similar temperatures and confusion when one material is heated or cooled. To thoroughly investigate this form of ambiguity, we designed a psychophysical experiment in which a participant discriminates between two materials given initial conditions that result in similar temperatures (i.e., ambiguous initial conditions). We conducted a study with 32 human participants and a robot. Humans and the robot confused the materials. We also found that robots can overcome this ambiguity using two temperature sensors with different temperatures prior to contact. We support this conclusion based on a mathematical proof using a heat transfer model and empirical results in which a robot achieved 100% accuracy compared to 5% human accuracy. Our results also indicate that robots with a single temperature sensor can use subtle cues to outperform humans. Overall, our work provides insights into challenging conditions for material recognition via heat transfer, and suggests methods by which robots can overcome these challenges.

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Section: B Robot Thermal Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Recognition via Heat Transfer Given Ambiguous Initial Conditions

Bhattacharjee

Clever

Wade

et al. 2021

IEEE Trans. Haptics

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“…Our skin also enables us to sense heat from both touching a warm object and absorbing light radiation. [83][84][85][86] Attempts to mimic such fascinating system have led to developing a platform technology called electronic skin or e-skin. [87][88][89][90][91] Heat flux and thermal radiation sensing in e-skin concepts can give the sense of touch and heat of sun light to prosthetic limbs and enables remote healthcare monitoring.…”

Section: Thermal Energy Harvesting and Sensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[87][88][89][90][91] Heat flux and thermal radiation sensing in e-skin concepts can give the sense of touch and heat of sun light to prosthetic limbs and enables remote healthcare monitoring. [83,84,89,[92][93][94] For e-skin applications, it is essential to reduce the bulkiness and power consumption of the functional systems through designing self-powered sensors that can detect various stimuli. [95,96] Thermal sensitive materials that generate electric response upon temperature variations can play an effective role to accomplish such goals.…”

Section: Thermal Energy Harvesting and Sensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Plasmonics for Energy Harvesting and Sensing of Radiation and Heat

Chaharsoughi

2020

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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“…Takamuku et al [17] mounted thermistors in a soft anthropomorphic robot fingertip, and Xu et al [32] used a BioTac sensor on a robot to identify objects using compliance, texture, and thermal properties. Others have extended thermal sensing over a larger surface area of robots in the form of robotic skin [33]. The presence of thermal sensing in robotic skin has been shown to increase the accuracy of material recognition for common household objects [34].…”

Section: B Robot Thermal Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Recognition from Heat Transfer given Varying Initial Conditions and Short-Duration Contact

Bhattacharjee¹,

Wade²,

Kemp³

2015

Robotics: Science and Systems XI

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Abstract-When making contact with an object, a robot can use a tactile sensor consisting of a heating element and a temperature sensor to recognize the object's material based on conductive heat transfer from the tactile sensor to the object. When this type of tactile sensor has time to fully reheat prior to contact and the duration of contact is long enough to achieve a thermal steady state, numerous methods have been shown to perform well. In order to enable robots to more efficiently sense their environments and take advantage of brief contact events over which they lack control, we focus on the problem of material recognition from heat transfer given varying initial conditions and short-duration contact. We present both modelbased and data-driven methods. For the model-based method, we modeled the thermodynamics of the sensor in contact with a material as contact between two semi-infinite solids. For the data-driven methods, we used three machine learning algorithms (SVM+PCA, k-NN+PCA, HMMs) with time series of raw temperature measurements and temperature change estimates. When recognizing 11 materials with varying initial conditions and 3-fold cross-validation, SVM+PCA outperformed all other methods, achieving 84% accuracy with 0.5 s of contact and 98% accuracy with 1.5 s of contact.

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A force and thermal sensing skin for robots in human environments

Cited by 30 publications

References 40 publications

Material Recognition via Heat Transfer Given Ambiguous Initial Conditions

Material Recognition via Heat Transfer Given Ambiguous Initial Conditions

Hybrid Plasmonics for Energy Harvesting and Sensing of Radiation and Heat

Material Recognition from Heat Transfer given Varying Initial Conditions and Short-Duration Contact

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