This grant will support research that will contribute novel methodologies related to multi-arm soft robots, advancing its practical use in applications involving close collaboration with humans. Soft robots have great promise in versatile applications involving interactions with humans, such as elder care, collaborative surgery, work/life assistance, and collaborative fruit harvesting. Taking apple-picking as a motivating case study, the goal of this project is to develop a novel soft robot system equipped with multiple soft arms, termed soft multi-arm robot or SMART, and to advance its practical use in applications involving close collaboration with humans. This award supports fundamental research that addresses the major challenges in soft robot design and fabrication, motion planning and control, environment and human perception, and human-robot interaction. The new designs and methodologies will enable safe, efficient, and robust cooperation between multiple soft robot arms and humans. The soft multi-arm robot system can not only improve production efficiency (for example, in assisting fruit harvesting), but also contribute to meeting the nation’s urgent need to take care of the elderly population (for example, in elder care and assisted living). Therefore, results from this research will benefit the U.S. economy and life quality. This research involves several disciplines including soft robotics, control, human-robot interaction, perception and learning, and agriculture automation. The multi-disciplinary approach also facilitates the participation of underrepresented groups in research and positively impacts engineering education.
The soft multi-arm robot system is expected to offer dexterity, efficiency, and intrinsic safety, and achieve productive collaboration with humans with an array of exciting potential applications. To achieve this goal, five synergistic research thrusts are pursued to overcome key scientific challenges: 1) designing and fabricating soft multi-arm robots to realize simultaneous actuation and stiffness-turning and enable dexterous manipulation, 2) advancing motion planning and control approaches for these soft robots to achieve robust manipulation in 3D space in the presence of stationary and dynamic obstacles, 3) formalizing trust-based human-robot interaction to realize efficient human-robot collaboration by explicitly accommodating the dynamics of human trust in the soft multi-arm robot policy, 4) developing orchard and human motion perception algorithms to robustly obtain 3D tree and human position/pose information to support the fruit harvesting application, and 5) evaluating the soft multi-arm robot system via extensive lab and field experiments in the context of collaborative apple harvesting. Collectively, advances from these research endeavors are expected to make soft multi-arm robots practically viable, especially for applications involving close collaboration with humans.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
