Whole-body robot sensing and human-robot interaction

Applications that require robots that operate in an uncertain environment, and/or require close human-robot interaction, are in great demand. Examples include robots preparing the Mars surface for human arrival; robots for assembly of large space telescopes; robot helpers for the elderly; robot search and disposal of war mines. Advances in this area, while impressive, are also slow to appear. Difficulties are multiple, both on the robotics and on human side: robots have hard time adjusting in unstructured tasks, while human cognition has serious limits in manipulating 3D motion. As a result, applications where robots operate near humans - or far away from them - are exceedingly rare. The way out of this impasse is to supply the robot with a whole-body sensing, plus related intelligence - an ability to sense surrounding objects at the robot´s whole body and utilize this data in real time. This calls for large-area flexible arrays - sensitive skin covering the whole robot body. The whole-body sensing brings interesting, even unexpected, properties: robots become inherently safe; human operators can move them fast, with “natural” speeds; resulting robot motion strategies exceed human spatial reasoning skills; natural synergy of human-robot teams becomes realistic; a mix of supervised and unsupervised operation becomes possible. We will review the algorithmic, cognitive science, hardware (materials, electronics, computing), and control issues involved in realizing such systems.