Electronic Skin with Energy Autonomous Proximity Sensing for Human-Robot Interaction

Electronic skin or eSkin is critical to enhance the interactive capabilities of robots through physical contact. The current approaches to develop this capability involve using multiple sensors distributed on robot's body. Energy requirement of such eSkin is currently met through batteries, which is not ideal as it may reduce the operational time and requires frequent charging. In this work, we present an eSkin consisting of distributed energy autonomous proximity sensors. The eSkin contains an array of miniaturized solar cells to generate energy needed for infrared LEDs based proximity sensors. As a proof of concept, the eSkin has been integrated in an industrial robot arm UR5 and proximity sensing has been shown to enable safe Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).