How shadows can help robots understand human touch

Recommendable! Don't get spooked! Stay in the shadow! 😄

"This paper proposes and evaluates the use of image classification for detailed, full-body human-robot tactile interaction. A camera positioned below a translucent robot skin captures shadows generated from human touch and infers social gestures from the captured images. This approach enables rich tactile interaction with robots without the need for the sensor arrays used in traditional social robot tactile skins. ..."

How shadows can help robots understand human touch Cornell University researchers created a low-cost method for soft robots to detect a range of physical interactions, from pats to punches to hugs, without relying on touch at all. Instead, a USB camera located inside the robot captures the shadow movements of hand gestures on the robot’s skin and classifies them with machine-learning software.

Here is the referenced paper:

ShadowSense: Detecting Human Touch in a Social Robot Using Shadow Image Classification (open access)