Robots that aren't afraid of contact

The talk was given by Professor Hannah Stewart, she did here PhD here at
Stanford and worked on OceanOne, a bimanual underwater humanoid robot.
Her area of interest is very diverse in terms of robots whether underwater or
burrowing in soil or lunar regolith. Main idea of the talk is the focus on robots
which are robust, with which we can take risks. She talked about building hands
of robots for the oceanone project, how resilient it had to be. Then she talked
about the three main principles for robustness: demonstrate resilience to
reduce operational risk, harness environment to their functional advantage and
actively sense contact conditions to respond to variation. She discussed about
the prediction model to predict failures. A lot of discussion was about robots
using a suction cup, because its cheap and robust. Haptic search was discussed,
how it improves the grasp success. Tactile sensing with electronics far from
contact was discussed, what are the challenges in that and how to overcome
them. Acoustic based tactile sensing was discussed as an example. Towards the
end, she discussed about the work being done by her students including
suction cups, tactile sensing, human assistance, grasping etc.