Sensitive skins and somatic processing for affective and sociable robots based upon a somatic alphabet approach

Abstract

The sense of touch is one of the most important senses of the human body. This thesis describes the biologically inspired design of "sensitive skins" for two different robotic platforms: Leonardo, a high degree-of-freedom, sociable robot and the Huggable, a portable therapeutic robotic companion for relational, affective touch. The first step in the design of the "sensitive skin" for Leonardo: a set of hands featuring 40 force-sensing resistors (FSRs) and embedded processing was created. Somatosensory inspired algorithms for calculating the location, direction of motion, and orientation with a set of these sensors forms the first stage in the design of a "Virtual Somatosensory Cortex." A multi-modal (temperature, electric field sensors, and Quantum Tunneling Composite (QTC) based force sensors) three dimensional sensor array was created as the first step in the design of the "sensitive skin" for the Huggable. A soft silicone skin was placed over this array. Preliminary results using neural networks show that the affective content of touch can be determined. This work was sponsored in part by the NSF Center for Bits and Atoms Contract No.CCR-0122419, a Microsoft iCampus grant, and the MIT Media Lab Things That Think and Digital Life Consortia.