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

TL;DR
CushSense is a low-cost, soft, stretchable tactile skin for robots that provides accurate, durable contact sensing, enhancing safe physical human-robot interaction, especially in caregiving tasks.
Contribution
The paper introduces CushSense, a novel fabric-based tactile-sensing skin that is soft, stretchable, cost-effective, and easy to fabricate for improved robot safety in pHRI.
Findings
High sensing accuracy with 0.58% error
Durability with only 0.054% accuracy drop after 1000 interactions
Positive user perception of safety and comfort
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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials · Tactile and Sensory Interactions
