Remote-Control Haptic "Microfingers" Tickle Pillbugs in the Name of Science

Scaling down an operator's hand movements to insect size, this microrobotic system feeds back even tiny touches.

Gareth Halfacree
1 year ago โ€ข Robotics / Sensors

A team of roboticists from Ritsumeikan University have developed a small-scale robotic manipulator, dubbed a "microfinger," which has been put to work for an unusual yet scientific task: tickling pillbugs.

"Human-robot interaction technology has contributed to improving sociality for humanoid robots," the team claims of the foundation for its work. "At scales far from human scales, a microrobot can interact with an environment in a small world. Microsensors have been applied to measurement of forces by flying or walking insects. Meanwhile, most previous works focused on the measurement of the behavior of insects."

The team wanted to apply robotics to the problem of interacting with insects, though, and set about designing a new manipulator for the task: A "soft microfinger," featuring artificial muscles and tactile sensors feeding back into a haptic teleoperation system, worn on a human hand โ€” with the movement of the hand scaled down and used to inform the movement of the microfingers, while feedback from the microfingers is fed back to the human operator.

"A soft pneumatic balloon actuator acts as the artificial muscle, and a flexible strain sensor using a liquid metal provides tactile sensing," the researchers explain in their paper, brought to our attention by IEEE Spectrum. "Force interaction between a pill bug and the microfinger could be accomplished. The microfinger (12ร—3mm ร— 490ฮผm) can move and touch an insect, and it can detect reaction force from an insect."

The microfingers proved capable of detecting even the tiny pitter-patter of roly-poly feet .(๐Ÿ“น: Konishi et al)

To prove the concept, the team set about ticking pillbugs โ€” also known as roly-polies or woodlice, using the microfingers to interact with their legs. As they tickled the insects, the team was able to measure pushback from their legs โ€” despite the overall reaction force being under 10mN, proving the microfingers' sensitivity as well as the fact that pillbugs may, apparently, be ticklish.

"A microfinger [can thus be] an end effector for the active sensing of reaction force from a small insect," the team concludes. "We anticipate that our results will lead to further evaluation of small living things as well as technology development for human-environment interaction."

The team's work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports under open-access terms.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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