BeBop’s Sophisticated Fabric Sensors Help Robots Feel Better
Robots will need a sophisticated sense of touch to live and work within human spaces, and BeBop’s new RoboSkin sensors can provide it.
An oft-repeated truism within the robotics industry is that robots must conform to human spaces, as opposed to humans tailoring their spaces to robots. In practical terms, that often means that robots need to mimic human physiology to work within the environments we built to suit our needs. Robots will need a sophisticated sense of touch to accomplish that and BeBop’s new RoboSkin sensors can provide it.
The simplest and cheapest way to give a robot a sense of touch is to equip it with a standard momentary switch, like those often used as limit switches. Such a switch is enough to let a robot know if it touches something at that point. But this minimalistic hardware approach has several problems.
The most glaring issue is that it only senses touch at a single point — the point at which the switch mounts to the robot. Covering a robot in switches to gain more resolution soon becomes impractical. Another major issue is that those switches are binary (either closed or open). The robot would know if it was touching something, but it wouldn’t know how much force it was applying. It would, for instance, have difficulty picking up an egg without crushing it.
BeBop’s RoboSkin sensor fabric solves both problems by replicating human skin. While nerve ending density varies across the human body, even our least sensitive areas have high “resolution” and allow us to perceive small changes in pressure. RoboSkin actually outperforms human skin, as it can detect the location and force of a touch with more accuracy that we can. Because RoboSkin is only 1mm thick, it is easy for roboticists to integrate into their designs. BeBop’s demonstrations show RoboSkin on the fingertips of a robotic hand since that is the most logical location, but RoboSkin could cover many other areas of a robot.
Unlike much of the technology we feature that is still in the early stages of development, RoboSkin is available now. It isn’t a direct-to-consumer product and so we don’t have information on pricing, but BeBop is ready to discuss solutions for all industries.