Enable Natural Tactile Interaction for Robot Dog based on Large-format Distributed Flexible Pressure Sensors

Touch is an important channel for human-robot interaction, while it is challenging for robots to recognize human touch accurately and make appropriate responses. In this paper, we design and implement a set of large-format distributed flexible pressure sensors on a robot dog to enable natural human-robot tactile interaction. Through a heuristic study, we sorted out 81 tactile gestures commonly used when humans interact with real dogs and 44 dog reactions. A gesture classification algorithm based on ResNet is proposed to recognize these 81 human gestures, and the classification accuracy reaches 98.7%. In addition, an action prediction algorithm based on Transformer is proposed to predict dog actions from human gestures, reaching a 1-gram BLEU score of 0.87. Finally, we compare the tactile interaction with the voice interaction during a freedom human-robot-dog interactive playing study. The results show that tactile interaction plays a more significant role in alleviating user anxiety, stimulating user excitement and improving the acceptability of robot dogs.

Computational Discovery of Microstructured Composites with Optimal Strength-Toughness Trade-Offs

The conflict between strength and toughness is a fundamental problem in engineering materials design. However, systematic discovery of microstructured composites with optimal strength-toughness trade-offs has never been demonstrated due to the discrepancies between simulation and reality and the lack of data-efficient exploration of the entire Pareto front. Here, we report a widely applicable pipeline harnessing physical experiments, numerical simulations, and artificial neural networks to efficiently discover microstructured designs that are simultaneously tough and strong. Using a physics-based simulator with moderate complexity, our strategy runs a data-driven proposal-validation workflow in a nested-loop fashion to bridge the gap between simulation and reality in high sample efficiency. Without any prescribed expert knowledge of materials design, our approach automatically identifies existing toughness enhancement mechanisms that were traditionally discovered through trial-and-error or biomimicry. We provide a blueprint for the computational discovery of optimal designs, which inverts traditional scientific approaches, and is applicable to a wide range of research problems beyond composites, including polymer chemistry, fluid dynamics, meteorology, and robotics.

An Integrated Design Pipeline for Tactile Sensing Robotic Manipulators

Traditional robotic manipulator design methods require extensive, time-consuming, and manual trial and error to produce a viable design. During this process, engineers often spend their time redesigning or reshaping components as they discover better topologies for the robotic manipulator. Tactile sensors, while useful, often complicate the design due to their bulky form factor. We propose an integrated design pipeline to streamline the design and manufacturing of robotic manipulators with knitted, glove-like tactile sensors. The proposed pipeline allows a designer to assemble a collection of modular, open-source components by applying predefined graph grammar rules. The end result is an intuitive design paradigm that allows the creation of new virtual designs of manipulators in a matter of minutes. Our framework allows the designer to fine-tune the manipulator's shape through cage-based geometry deformation. Finally, the designer can select surfaces for adding tactile sensing. Once the manipulator design is finished, the program will automatically generate 3D printing and knitting files for manufacturing. We demonstrate the utility of this pipeline by creating four custom manipulators tested on real-world tasks: screwing in a wing screw, sorting water bottles, picking up an egg, and cutting paper with scissors.

Dynamic Modeling of Hand-Object Interactions via Tactile Sensing

Tactile sensing is critical for humans to perform everyday tasks. While significant progress has been made in analyzing object grasping from vision, it remains unclear how we can utilize tactile sensing to reason about and model the dynamics of hand-object interactions. In this work, we employ a high-resolution tactile glove to perform four different interactive activities on a diversified set of objects. We build our model on a cross-modal learning framework and generate the labels using a visual processing pipeline to supervise the tactile model, which can then be used on its own during the test time. The tactile model aims to predict the 3d locations of both the hand and the object purely from the touch data by combining a predictive model and a contrastive learning module. This framework can reason about the interaction patterns from the tactile data, hallucinate the changes in the environment, estimate the uncertainty of the prediction, and generalize to unseen objects. We also provide detailed ablation studies regarding different system designs as well as visualizations of the predicted trajectories. This work takes a step on dynamics modeling in hand-object interactions from dense tactile sensing, which opens the door for future applications in activity learning, human-computer interactions, and imitation learning for robotics.