RobotSweater: Scalable, Generalizable, and Customizable Machine-Knitted Tactile Skins for Robots

TL;DR

RobotSweater introduces a scalable, customizable, and fabric-based tactile skin for robots, enabling robust contact detection, localization, and pressure sensing through industrial knitting techniques, and demonstrates its effectiveness in control and interaction tasks.

Contribution

This work presents a novel machine-knitted tactile skin that is scalable, customizable, and easily applied to various robots, advancing tactile sensing technology in robotics.

Findings

Robust contact detection and pressure sensing demonstrated on flat and curved surfaces.

Successful closed-loop control using tactile feedback in robot applications.

Low-cost, customizable fabrication process via industrial knitting machines.

Abstract

Tactile sensing is essential for robots to perceive and react to the environment. However, it remains a challenge to make large-scale and flexible tactile skins on robots. Industrial machine knitting provides solutions to manufacture customizable fabrics. Along with functional yarns, it can produce highly customizable circuits that can be made into tactile skins for robots. In this work, we present RobotSweater, a machine-knitted pressure-sensitive tactile skin that can be easily applied on robots. We design and fabricate a parameterized multi-layer tactile skin using off-the-shelf yarns, and characterize our sensor on both a flat testbed and a curved surface to show its robust contact detection, multi-contact localization, and pressure sensing capabilities. The sensor is fabricated using a well-established textile manufacturing process with a programmable industrial knitting machine, which makes it highly customizable and low-cost. The textile nature of the sensor also makes it easily fit curved surfaces of different robots and have a friendly appearance. Using our tactile skins, we conduct closed-loop control with tactile feedback for two applications: (1) human lead-through control of a robot arm, and (2) human-robot interaction with a mobile robot.