AI and Intelligent Synthetic Skin: Advancing Beyond Human Skin for Sensory Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

We present a wearable toolkit designed to enhance shared perception between humans and robots, facilitating real-time data collection to support embedded AI based applications. Advancements in wearable sensor-based technologies mean there are opportunities to develop rich haptic interaction experiences leading to novel Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. However, a significant amount of hardware and software in this domain is not open-source. It is difficult to modify or replace hardware, often necessitating expert programming. We have developed a hardware and corresponding software toolkit that allows for the integration of both actuators and sensors, which can interface with an environment comprising of humans, robots, and the area in which they interact. The key features of this toolkit are as follows: 1) Modular hardware design – Users can select and combine the sensors and actuators they wish to work with. 2) Visual programming interface – Users do not need programming skills; complex mappings between sensor data and actuators can be achieved simply through drag-and-drop functionality on the interface. 3) ROS-based development – This enables the rapid addition/removal of actuators and sensors, facilitating interaction between sensors, actuators, and robotic data. Currently, the toolkit is being tested with various sensors (pressure, distance, capacitive, elasticity) and actuators (heat, vibration, audio, EMS). We will use subjective human perceptions as input, allowing AI to autonomously make decisions on mapping sensor data to the corresponding actuators or robot actions. Citation Feng Zhou, Steve Benford Alan Chamberlain (2025) AI and Intelligent Synthetic Skin: Advancing Beyond Human Skin for Sensory Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), The Third UK AI Conference 2025, June 23 - 24, London, UK Conference https://uk-ai.org/ukai2025/ Acknowledgements The Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship: Somabotics: Creatively Embodying Artificial Intelligence [grant number EP/Z534808/1] EPSRC https://www.somabotics.ac.uk/