Główne pojęcia
A soft, expandable robotic manipulator with embedded capacitive proximity sensing arrays can safely and efficiently clean the entire surface of human limbs during bathing assistance.
Streszczenie
This paper introduces a novel soft robotic manipulator, called SkinGrip, designed for safe and effective bathing assistance. The SkinGrip comprises two tendon-driven soft fingers equipped with capacitive proximity sensors. The capacitive sensing allows the manipulator to detect and maintain continuous contact with the human skin, enabling it to clean the entire surface of a limb efficiently.
The authors conducted a human study with 12 participants and 96 bathing trials to evaluate the cleaning performance and user experience of the SkinGrip compared to a baseline rigid end effector. The results demonstrate that the SkinGrip achieved an average cleaning effectiveness of 88.8% on arms and 81.4% on legs, significantly outperforming the baseline. Participant feedback also validated the SkinGrip's ability to maintain safety, comfort, and thorough cleaning during the bathing process.
Key highlights:
The SkinGrip soft robotic manipulator is designed with two tendon-driven soft fingers and embedded capacitive proximity sensors to enable safe and effective whole-limb bathing.
The capacitive servoing control strategy allows the SkinGrip to detect and maintain continuous contact with the human skin, adapting to changes in limb position and size.
The human study results demonstrate the SkinGrip's superior cleaning performance and user experience compared to a baseline rigid end effector.
Participants reported higher levels of safety, comfort, and cleaning effectiveness with the SkinGrip, indicating its potential to enhance the quality of bathing assistance.
Statystyki
The SkinGrip achieved an average cleaning effectiveness of 88.8% on arms and 81.4% on legs across the 96 bathing trials.
The baseline rigid end effector achieved an average cleaning effectiveness of 63.4% on arms and 55.4% on legs.
Cytaty
"The SkinGrip presents a consistent quantitative bathing performance increase over the current rigid manipulator (Baseline)."
"Participant-provided feedback reinforces this finding, in which we observe a statistically significant difference in reported preferences for a soft manipulation strategy in terms of safety, comfort, and thorough skin bathing capabilities."