Customizing textile and tactile skins for interactive industrial robots

Abstract Textiles are a promising material for building tactile skins because they are lightweight, flexible, and can conform to complex surfaces. They enhance robot-human interaction by localizing contact points and measuring contact forces. This paper presents a solution for rapidly fabricating, calibrating, and deploying these skins on industrial robot arms. The novel automated skin calibration procedure maps skin locations to robot geometry and calibrates contact force. Through experiments on a FANUC LR Mate 200id/7L industrial robot, we demonstrate that tactile skins made from textiles can be effectively used for human-robot interaction in industrial environments. We demonstrated the following: 1) modifying trajectories using human contact signals and 2) improving force interactions with humans using tactile skins This work presents a comprehensive solution for rapidly fabricating, calibrating, and deploying textile and tactile skins for interactive industrial robots. Our contributions are as follows: 1) we introduce a method for determining skin parameters based on robot geometry; 2) we propose an automated skin calibration process that calibrates both the position and force reading from the skin to the robot; and 3) we demonstrate how the skins can be integrated into robot control and learning to improve the safety and interactivity of industrial robots through experiments on a FANUC LR Mate 200id/7L industrial robot arm.