The sense of touch is essential for reliable mapping between the environment and a robot which interacts physically with objects. Presumably, an artificial tactile skin would facilitate safe interaction of the robots with the environment. In this work, we present our color-coded tactile sensor, incorporating plastic optical fibers (POF), transparent silicone rubber and an off-the-shelf color camera. Processing electronics are placed away from the sensing surface to make the sensor robust to harsh environments. Contact localization is possible thanks to the lower number of light sources compared to the number of camera POFs. Classical machine learning techniques and a hierarchical classification scheme were used for contact localization. Specifically, we generated the mapping from stimulation to sensation of a robotic perception system using our sensor. We achieved a force sensing range up to 18 N with the force resolution of around 3.6 N and the spatial resolution of 8 mm. The color-coded tactile sensor is suitable for tactile exploration and might enable further innovations in robust tactile sensing.
With the aim of making wearable and biocompatible parts, technological advances in bioengineering led to the emergence of hydrogels @cite_3 . A hydrogel, a rubbery and transparent material composed mostly of water, can also be a good choice for safe physical HRI.
@cite_3
2049609871 2266720690 1970061687 2006225923
Hydrogels have found wide application in biosensors due to their versatile nature. This family of materials is applied in biosensing either to increase the loading capacity compared to two-dimensional surfaces, or to support biospecific hydrogel swelling occurring subsequent to specific recognition of an analyte. This review focuses on various principles underpinning the design of biospecific hydrogels acting through various molecular mechanisms in transducing the recognition event of label-free analytes. Towards this end, we describe several promising hydrogel systems that when combined with the appropriate readout platform and quantitative approach could lead to future real-life applications. Printed hydrogel composites with plant-inspired architectures dynamically change shape on immersion in water to yield prescribed complex morphologies. Implantable and wearable medical devices are used for monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment of an ever-increasing range of medical conditions, leading to an improved quality of life for patients. The addition of wireless connectivity to medical devices has enabled post-deployment tuning of therapy and access to device data virtually anytime and anywhere but, at the same time, has led to the emergence of security attacks as a critical concern. While cryptography and secure communication protocols may be used to address most known attacks, the lack of a viable secure connection establishment and key exchange mechanism is a fundamental challenge that needs to be addressed. We propose a vibration-based secure side channel between an external device (medical programmer or smartphone) and a medical device. Vibration is an intrinsically short-range, user-perceptible channel that is suitable for realizing physically secure communication at low energy and size weight overheads. We identify and address key challenges associated with the vibration channel, and propose a vibration-based wakeup and key exchange scheme, named SecureVibe, that is resistant to battery drain attacks. We analyze the risk of acoustic eavesdropping attacks and propose an acoustic masking countermeasure. We demonstrate and evaluate vibration-based wakeup and key exchange between a smartphone and a prototype medical device in the context of a realistic human body model. Two complementary strategies can be used in the fabrication of molecular biomaterials. In the 'top-down' approach, biomaterials are generated by stripping down a complex entity into its component parts (for example, paring a virus particle down to its capsid to form a viral cage). This contrasts with the 'bottom-up' approach, in which materials are assembled molecule by molecule (and in some cases even atom by atom) to produce novel supramolecular architectures. The latter approach is likely to become an integral part of nanomaterials manufacture and requires a deep understanding of individual molecular building blocks and their structures, assembly properties and dynamic behaviors. Two key elements in molecular fabrication are chemical complementarity and structural compatibility, both of which confer the weak and noncovalent interactions that bind building blocks together during self-assembly. Using natural processes as a guide, substantial advances have been achieved at the interface of nanomaterials and biology, including the fabrication of nanofiber materials for three-dimensional cell culture and tissue engineering, the assembly of peptide or protein nanotubes and helical ribbons, the creation of living microlenses, the synthesis of met al nanowires on DNA templates, the fabrication of peptide, protein and lipid scaffolds, the assembly of electronic materials by bacterial phage selection, and the use of radiofrequency to regulate molecular behaviors.