They turned a Baymax costume into robot skin! 🎈 Whole-body contact with a humanoid is usually handled one of two ways, and both give something up. Collision avoidance keeps a comfortable geometric margin, but once contact actually happens it has nothing to offer. Robotic skin measures contact directly, except thin skin leaves almost no margin, so a slow reaction or a force past the material's elastic limit becomes a real problem. A team from KAIST, DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology) and UIUC inflated the skin instead! 🇰🇷 The envelope is a single-piece commercial Baymax costume. Inflating it puts a large standoff distance between the contact surface and the rigid frame underneath, which recovers the geometric margin of collision avoidance. Then they put the sensors inside it. Alright, let's have a look at what's inside. Time-of-flight sensors pointed into a sealed, controlled volume avoid most of the errors that come with perception in open environments. And because the whole surface is compliant, even a small object deforms a large area, so it registers clearly. → 116 ToF sensors across 16 modules, tilted 45° for 360° coverage per body segment, at 20 Hz with no blind spots → An MLP predicts what the skin surface should look like from joint angles alone → Contact is detected as the deviation between the predicted and observed point clouds, → Validated on single-point contact, multi-touch, and full-body hugging Hugging is one of the experimental conditions, and it's the hardest case here as it is a distributed contact across many segments at once. Which is exactly what you'd want from a Baymax, I guess :D 🔗 Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →