Electromagnetic Simulation of Robotic Dynamic Scenes for Novel Sensor Developments

To ensure the safety and efficiency of human-robot collaboration, new sensor modalities are required that capture a robot's entire environment and provide a sense of touch. Robotic skins based on either pressure or capacitive sensors provide a sensing range of up to 20 cm and enable the robot to react to contact with its environment. A novel robotic skin with a sensor that utilizes the electromagnetic (EM) properties of flexible metasurfaces could have a sensing range of up to 1 m and enable predictive motion planning and safe robot control. The development of this sensor requires EM simulation of dynamic scenes, which cannot be performed directly with existing simulators. To overcome this challenge, we propose and implement a software bridge between a robotic and a full-wave EM simulator to facilitate the development of novel sensors. We experimentally validated our framework by simulating two dynamic scenes and determining the scattering parameters of skin-mounted antennas that correlate with the distance between the object and the sensor.