CushSense: Soft, Stretchable, and Comfortable Tactile-Sensing Skin for Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Boxin Xu, Luoyan Zhong, Grace Zhang, Xiaoyu Liang, Diego Virtue, Rishabh Madan, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Abstract
Whole-arm tactile feedback is crucial for robots to ensure safe physical interaction with their surroundings. This paper introduces CushSense, a fabric-based soft and stretchable tactile-sensing skin designed for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) tasks such as robotic caregiving. Using stretchable fabric and hyper-elastic polymer, CushSense identifies contacts by monitoring capacitive changes due to skin deformation. CushSense is cost-effective (∼US$7 per taxel) and easy to fabricate. We detail the sensor design and fabrication process and perform characterization, highlighting its high sensing accuracy (relative error of 0.58%) and durability (0.054% accuracy drop after 1000 interactions). We also present a user study underscoring its perceived safety and comfort for the assistive task of limb manipulation. We open source all sensor-related resources on emprise.cs.cornell.edu/cushsense.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2024_cushsensesoftstr,
title = {CushSense: Soft, Stretchable, and Comfortable Tactile-Sensing Skin for Physical Human-Robot Interaction},
author = {Boxin Xu and Luoyan Zhong and Grace Zhang and Xiaoyu Liang and Diego Virtue and Rishabh Madan and Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee},
booktitle = {ICRA 2024},
year = {2024}
}