快猫短视频

Soft robots with translucent 鈥渟kin鈥� can detect human touch with internal cameras and differentiate between a prod, a stroke or a hug. The technology could lead to better non-verbal communication between humans and robots.

Guy Hoffman and his colleagues at Cornell University, New York, created a prototype robot with nylon skin stretched over a 1.2-metre tall cylindrical scaffold atop a platform on wheels. Inside the cylinder sits a commercial USB camera which is used to interpret different types of touch on the nylon.

The team built a large database from camera images of humans making one of six interactions with the skin of the robot, such as a point, a punch or a palm touch. These were used to train a neural network that gave the robot the ability to detect and identify different interactions with an accuracy of up to 92 per cent.

Team member Yuhan Hu says that the approach effectively gave the robot a new sense that lies somewhere between that of human touch and sight.

The researchers then assigned simple commands to the gestures. They could poke it to make it turn around, pat it on the back to order it from the room or even stroke it forwards or backwards to make it roll in that direction.

The hug wasn鈥檛 assigned a command, but shows the robot can identify gestures all over its skin. Because it uses the shadow of a person鈥檚 body to determine what type of touch they are making, it had a hard time identifying a hug at night. It also confused a punch with a poke during daylight.

Incorporating touch sensitivity in robots currently requires heavy and expensive sensors and electronics. The new approach is a low-tech and low-cost alternative. It also allows soft robots, which offer safety benefits and an ability to fit into tight spaces, to detect touch without the need for rigid electronics on their surfaces.

Hoffman says that interaction between robots and people in the future will use a mixture of verbal and non-verbal cues.

鈥淭ouch has been a little bit of a weird topic recently, as in the past year it鈥檚 disappeared from our culture. But if we try to imagine back, you communicated a lot of things with gentle touch gestures,鈥� he says.

The team also demonstrated that with the addition of a projector, a robot could display a user interface on its skin and allow people to use it as a touchscreen.