Physically Interactive Robots

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Women in Engineering Committee organized a virtual event for the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and was honored to host Lydia Kavraki, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, and Vandi Verma as keynote speakers and panelists. These distinguished women have made significant contributions to the field of robotics and have been recognized for their exceptional achievements in research and education: they have all been past keynote or plenary speakers at a major international robotics conference. The presenters were invited to provide their valuable insights as women in the robotics field, engage with the attendees in meaningful conversations, and share their experiences and expertise. The event was held online in Gather, prior to the 2022 ICRA conference, to offer a platform for those unable to participate in the in-person event and to act as an icebreaker for early-career researchers who might be attending ICRA for the first time ( Figure 1 ). The event also enabled attendees to connect and network with other professionals in the field, as well as to contribute to the discussion on the critical topic of diversity and inclusivity in robotics.

This paper presents a control scheme for force sensitive, gentle grasping with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with a miniaturised version of the TacTip optical tactile sensor on all five fingertips. The tactile sensors provide high-resolution information about a grasp and how the fingers interact with held objects. We first describe a series of hardware developments for performing asynchronous sensor data acquisition and processing, resulting in a fast control loop sufficient for real-time grasp control. We then develop a novel grasp controller that uses tactile feedback from all five fingertip sensors simultaneously to gently and stably grasp 43 objects of varying geometry and stiffness, which is then applied to a human-to-robot handover task. These developments open the door to more advanced manipulation with underactuated hands via fast reflexive control using high-resolution tactile sensing.

This letter introduces the BRL/Pisa/IIT (BPI) SoftHand: a single actuator-driven, low-cost, 3D-printed, tendon-driven, underactuated robot hand that can be used to perform a range of grasping tasks. Based on the adaptive synergies of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, we design a new joint system and tendon routing to facilitate the inclusion of both soft and adaptive synergies, which helps us balance durability, affordability and grasping performance of the hand. The focus of this work is on the design, simulation, synergies and grasping tests of this SoftHand. The novel phalanges are designed and printed based on linkages, gear pairs and geometric restraint mechanisms, and can be applied to most tendon-driven robotic hands. We show that the robot hand can successfully grasp and lift various target objects and adapt to hold complex geometric shapes, reflecting the successful adoption of the soft and adaptive synergies. We intend to open-source the design of the hand so that it can be built cheaply on a home 3D-printer.

This paper proposes a controller for stable grasping of unknown-shaped objects by two robotic fingers with tactile fingertips. The grasp is stabilised by rolling the fingertips on the contact surface and applying a desired grasping force to reach an equilibrium state. The validation is both in simulation and on a fully-actuated robot hand (the Shadow Modular Grasper) fitted with custom-built optical tactile sensors (based on the BRL TacTip). The controller requires the orientations of the contact surfaces, which are estimated by regressing a deep convolutional neural network over the tactile images. Overall, the grasp system is demonstrated to achieve stable equilibrium poses on a range of objects varying in shape and softness, with the system being robust to perturbations and measurement errors. This approach also has promise to extend beyond grasping to stable in-hand object manipulation with multiple fingers.

A handover strategy is proposed that aims at natural and fluent robot to human object handovers. For the approaching phase, a globally asymptotically stable dynamical system (DS) is utilized, trained from human demonstrations and exploiting the existence of mirroring in the human wrist motion. The DS operates in the robot task space thus achieving independence with respect to the robot platform, encapsulating the position and orientation of the human wrist within a single DS. It is proven that the motion generated by such a DS, having as target the current wrist pose of the receiver’s hand, is bounded and converges to the previously unknown handover location. Haptic cues based on load estimates at the robot giver ensure full object load transfer before grip release. The proposed strategy is validated with simulations and experiments in real settings.