A hi-tech glove could give robots the same sense of touch as a human.
Stanford engineers say their invention could dramatically improve the dexterity of robots.
They have already developed a prototype that allows a robot hand to pick up a ripe berry without crushing it.
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Stanford researchers have developed sensors to give robotic hands a sense of touch. The sensor shown in this photo is sensitive enough to allow the finger to hold a blueberry without crushing it. In the future all the fingers and the palm would have similar electronic sensors that mimic the biological sensors in our skin.
HOW IT WORKS
Each sensor on the fingertip of the robotic glove is made of three flexible layers that work in concert.
The top and bottom layers are electrically active.
The researchers laid a grid of electrical lines on each of the two facing surfaces, like rows in a field, and turned these rows perpendicular to each other to create a dense array of small sensing pixels.
'This technology puts us on a path to one day giving robots the sort of sensing capabilities found in human skin,' said Zhenan Bao, who led the research.
Sensors in the glove's fingertips simultaneously measure the intensity and direction of pressure, two qualities essential to achieving manual dexterity.
The researchers must still perfect the technology to automatically control these sensors but when they do, a robot wearing the glove could have the dexterity to hold an egg between thumb and forefinger without smashing it or letting it slip.
In a paper published Nov. 21 in Science Robotics, chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her team demonstrated that the sensors work well enough to allow a robotic hand to touch a delicate berry and handle a pingpong ball without squashing them.
The electronic glove imitates the way layers of human skin work together to give our hands their extraordinary sensitivity.
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Postdoctoral scholar Clementine Boutry and master's student Marc Negre led development of the electronic sensors that mimic this human mechanism.
Each sensor on the fingertip of the robotic glove is made of three flexible layers that work in concert.
The top and bottom layers are electrically active.
The researchers laid a grid of electrical lines on each of the two facing surfaces, like rows in a field, and turned these rows perpendicular to each other to create a dense array of small sensing pixels.
They also made the bottom layer bumpy like the spinosum.
The hills and valleys of the bottom layer provided a way to map the intensity and direction of pressure to specific points on the perpendicular grids, much like human skin.
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HOW OUR SENSE OF TOUCH WORKS
The electronic glove imitates the way layers of human skin work together to give our hands their extraordinary sensitivity.
Our outer layer of skin is imbued with sensors to detect pressure, heat and other stimuli.
Our fingers and palms are particularly rich in touch sensors.
These sensors work in conjunction with a sublayer of skin called the spinosum, a bumpy microscopic terrain of hills and valleys.
That bumpiness is critical.
As our finger touches an object, the outer layer of skin moves closer to the spinosum.
A light touch is felt mainly by sensors close to the hilltops.
More intense pressure forces the outer skin down into the valleys of the spinosum, triggering more intense touch sensations.
This ability to sense shear force is part of what helps us gently but firmly hold an egg between thumb and forefinger.
Bao said that with proper programming a robotic hand wearing the current touch-sensing glove could perform a repetitive task such as lifting eggs off a conveyor belt and placing them into cartons.
The technology could also have applications in robot-assisted surgery, where precise touch control is essential.
But Bao's ultimate goal is to develop an advanced version of the glove that automatically applies just the right amount of force to handle an object safely without prior programming.
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'We can program a robotic hand to touch a raspberry without crushing it, but we're a long way from being able to touch and detect that it is raspberry and enable the robot to pick it up,' she said.