Paper Info
Title
CoboSkin: Soft Robot Skin With Variable Stiffness for Safer Human–Robot Collaboration
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TIE.2020.2978728
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Human–robot collaboration (HRC),robot skin,safety,variable sensitivity,variable stiffness
Journal
68
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0278-0046
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gaoyang Pang132.45
Geng Yang2299.17
Wenzheng Heng310.41
Zhiqiu Ye410.41
Xiaoyan Huang5499.39
Huayong Yang6229.10
Zhibo Pang737831.77