The importance of tactile sensing for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) and dexterous manipulation is well known. SkinSim is a novel simulation environment for tactile robot skins in which one can study design tradeoffs involved in deploying whole-body, dense sensor arrays. In this article, scalable modeling approaches are presented for simulating pressure-sensitive robot skin patches, with simultaneous consideration of sensing element geometry and mechanical structure, signal quality, data processing, and closed-loop force controller performance. The open-source simulation architecture of SkinSim is compatible with Gazebo and robot operating system (ROS) programming environments and supports both robot skin dynamic models, as well as tactile sensing element models. An experimentally validated force dispersion model was introduced for the simulation of sensors embedded in a mechanical damping layer. Simulation examples of robot skin with different tactile resolutions are presented using parameter values extracted from an experimental testbed. Thus, simulation results were experimentally validated and the skin sensor density impact on a simple pHRI controller performance was evaluated. Performance measures include center of pressure (COP) estimation error and control signal settling time, overshoot, and steady-state errors. Results suggest that while COP errors decrease in denser sensor skins, controller performance also deteriorates. Therefore, optimal robot skin designs will have to consider application-dependent tradeoffs. Similar results were confirmed in simulation with a larger skin patch containing approximately 4000 tactels and deployed on the end-effector of a collaborative mobile manipulator.Note to Practitioners—This article was motivated by the expensive and time-consuming process of designing tactile skin for robots. When designing pressure-sensitive whole-body sensor arrays for physical human–robot interaction, there are tradeoffs related to sensor resolution, accuracy, and response time, among others. Instead of building prototypes and evaluating them experimentally, the SkinSim simulation environment allows automatic testing of skins with simultaneous consideration of sensing element geometry and mechanical structure, signal quality, data processing, and closed-loop force controller performance. The user can specify several configurations to test and thereby explore the best tradeoffs before actually prototyping any hardware.

With the rise of collaborative robots, the need for safe, reliable, and efficient physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) has grown. High-performance pHRI requires robust and stable controllers suitable for multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) and highly nonlinear robots. In this article, we describe a cascade-loop pHRI controller, which relies on human force and pose measurements and can adapt to varying robot dynamics online. It can also adapt to different users and simplifies the interaction by making the robot behave according to a prescribed dynamic model. In our controller formulation, two neural networks (NNs) in the “outer-loop” predict human motion intent and estimate a reference trajectory for the robot that the “inner-loop” controller follows. The inner-loop imposes a prescribed error dynamics (PED) with the help of a model-free neuroadaptive controller (NAC), which uses a NN to feedback linearize the robot dynamics. Lyapunov stability analysis gives weight tuning laws that guarantee that the error signals are bounded and the desired reference trajectory is achieved. Our control scheme was implemented on a Personal Robot 2 robot and validated through an exploratory experimental study in point-to-point collaborative motion. Results indicate fast convergence of our controller, and the resulting tracking error, motion jerk, and human control effort are comparable with other methods that require prior training, knowledge, and calibration.

Effective physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) needs to account for variable human dynamics and also predict human intent. Recently, there has been a lot of progress in adaptive impedance and admittance control for human-robot interaction. Not as many contributions have been reported on online adaptation schemes that can accommodate users with varying physical strength and skill level during interaction with a robot. The goal of this paper is to present and evaluate a novel adaptive admittance controller that can incorporate human intent, nominal task models, as well as variations in the robot dynamics. An outer-loop controller is developed using an ARMA model which is tuned using an adaptive inverse control technique. An inner-loop neuroadaptive controller linearizes the robot dynamics. Working in conjunction and online, this two-loop technique offers an elegant way to decouple the pHRI problem. Experimental results are presented comparing the performance of different types of admittance controllers. The results show that efficient online adaptation of the robot admittance model for different human subjects can be achieved. Specifically, the adaptive admittance controller reduces jerk which results in a smooth human-robot interaction.