From industrial collaborators to mood robots

In the workplace, robots can be competitors or helpers, or perhaps both. In the home, they need to be helpful or friendly or exhibit some other favorable aspect to earn their keep. Researchers have been working on both home and workplace robots, with the goal of making them play nicely with their human counterparts.

The march of robots into the workplace may be inexorable, with the computer and electronics products industry among manufacturers most likely to adopt robotics worldwide, according to Harold L. Sirkin, Michael Zinser, and Justin Rose at the Boston Consulting Group. “The real robotics revolution is ready to begin,” they write, adding that the global installed base of advanced robotics will accelerate from 2% to 3% annually now to 10% annually during the next decade.¹ Hardware and software costs will drop 20% over the next decade, and robotic system performance will increase 5% per year, they add.

YuMi collaborative dual-arm industrial robot
Courtesy of ABB

One company riding this trend is ABB, which at last year’s Hannover Fair introduced YuMi, described by the company as “the world’s first truly collaborative dual-arm industrial robot.” YuMi (the name is derived from “you and me”) builds on the company’s history in robotics, which extends back at least to 1974 when the company introduced a microprocessor-controlled, all-electric industrial robot.

“The new era of robotic coworkers is here and an integral part of our Next Level strategy,” said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer at the time of YuMi’s introduction. “YuMi makes collaboration between humans and robots a reality. It is the result of years of research and development and will change the way humans and robots interact. YuMi is an element of our Internet of Things, Services, and People strategy creating an automated future together.”

YuMi, featuring dual arms, flexible hands, a universal parts feeding system, camera-based part location capability, lead-through programming, and precise motion control, targets applications such as small parts assembly in the consumer-electronics industry. Steve Bush at Electronics Weekly reported that YuMi has found employment at Sony U.K., where it performs pick-and-place operations on a camera production line.²

Safety is critical for a robot operating near humans. According to ABB, YuMi—weighing 38 kg, having human dimensions, and performing human-like movements—features an inherently safe design thanks to its lightweight, rigid magnesium skeleton covered with a floating plastic casing wrapped in soft padding to absorb impacts. If YuMi senses an unexpected impact, such as a collision with a coworker, it can pause its motion within milliseconds.

YuMi limits torque to 25 Nm. Bush quotes Mike Wilson, marketing manager at ABB, as saying, “The robot is UL-approved as safe, but if you put a knife in the gripper, you have to protect against the knife.”

Outside of the factory, you might soon encounter a social robot like Jibo, which, as this article goes to press, should be shipping soon to early adopters. Cynthia Breazeal of the MIT Media Lab and founder of Jibo Inc. has described Jibo as the offspring of R2D2 and an iPad.³ Breazeal said third-party developers will drive Jibo’s success, and the company offers an SDK that includes an animation editor, behavior editor, speech rule editor, and simulator. The company has been running hackathons and most recently put in an appearance at SXSW in Austin.

The tabletop Jibo is not ambulatory and communicates by voice and a tablet-like (though round) screen. Researchers at Cornell are proposing yet another way for robots to communicate—using a stretchable electroluminescent skin that changes color.

Noting that cephalopods such as octopuses have a combination of a stretchable skin and color-tuning organs to control both posture and color for visual communication and disguise, a team of Cornell graduate students, led by Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, developed a material that incorporates what the researchers call a hyper-elastic light-emitting capacitor (HLEC), which, they say, can endure more than twice the strain of previously tested stretchable displays.⁴ A Cornell news release suggests the material could lead to “mood robots,” which in a healthcare environment could change color in an effort to establish an emotional connection with patients.

The researchers have yet to build a mood robot. What they have built is a crawling, undulating soft robot made up of three six-layer HELC panels, with the top four layers providing the illumination and the bottom two layers serving as pneumatic actuators. Visit my blog at www.evaluationengineering.com for a link to a video displaying a stretching HELC panel.

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