Soft robots may not be in touch with human feelings, but they are getting better at feeling human touch.
Cornell University researchers have created a low-cost method for soft, deformable robots to detect a range of physical interactions, from pats to punches to hugs, without relying on touch at all. Instead, a USB camera located inside the robot captures the shadow movements of hand gestures on the robot’s skin and classifies them with machine-learning software.
The group’s paper, ShadowSense: Detecting Human Touch in a Social Robot Using Shadow Image Classification, published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. The paper’s lead author is doctoral student, Yuhan Hu. [Read more…] about Robots sense human touch using camera and shadows