Abstract :
Summary form only given. Robotics and automation in general and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in particular are growing research fields with many application areas that could have a big impact on human society. It has become increasingly apparent that social and interactive skills are necessary requirements in many application areas and contexts where robots need to interact and collaborate with other robots or humans in a safe and intelligent way. Tactile sensing is strategic for safe interaction of robots with humans, objects, possibly in unstructured conditions. Contact sensing provides an important and direct feedback to control contact both in case of voluntary and non-voluntary interactions with the environment. Advanced applications require a complex form of interaction, for instance in the case of skin based social cognition tasks, where the modes of interaction arise from the human-robot contact, and convey the information related to the robot task. This half day tutorial will present some of the technical, design and implementation challenges faced in the development of the ROBOSKIN technologies. ROBOSKIN is a FP7 project funded by the European Commission. The project aims to improve the ability of robots to act efficiently and safely during tasks involving human-robot interaction and to develop and demonstrate a range of new robot capabilities based on robot skin tactile feedback from large areas of the robot body. The three main objectives of the project are i) to develop new sensor technologies providing tactile feedback, ii) to develop and integrate fundamental cognitive structures for efficient and safe use of tactile data and iii) to develop cognitive mechanisms exploiting tactile feedback to improve human-robot interaction capabilities.
