Cable-Free Body Area Network using Conductive Fabric Sheets for Advanced Human-Robot Interaction

Wearable sensing networks offer a multitude of benefits for the user. One field that can benefit from such technologies is in-home robotics. Much work has been dedicated to the general area of interaction between robots and humans, and more specifically to gesture recognition. We propose a wearable monitoring network composed of conductive fabrics that can more easily facilitate robot interaction. It creates additional interaction by visual indication, and electronically by way of a local PC. This system creates a more natural human-robot interface and makes feasible many new forms of gesture recognition. Finally, we can address safety concerns; the garment gives us a method of locating the human and minimizing the possibility for robots to strike the user. In this paper, we lay out the architecture for such a system, and perform some of the initial characterization