Spatial Computing and Robotics

Anuradha Ranasinghe

David Reid

Emanuele Lindo Secco

Haptics in Robotics

Anuradha Ranasinghe & David Reid

Although psychologists often state that vision is the main way humans obtain information from the environment, when visual perception is impaired, haptic perception is the natural recourse. Even if vision is not impaired, the sense of touch often works in conjunction with visual perception. This combination of vision and touch is termed visuotactile. Research into visuotactile perception dates back to the 18th century and is increasingly becoming a multidisciplinary field of study not only by philosophers and psychologists but also by engineers, technologists, and roboticists in the fields of haptics, tactile robotics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence. We, at Hope university, are interested in exploring visuotactile sensors with applications such as image recognition, texture detection, shear and slip force identification. We name it as a haptic primary colour identifier and haptic primary colours are force, vibration, and temperature.

Spatial computing research explores the wearability and portability of haptic devices that give cutaneous feedback. One of the main goals of haptics is to develop an effective and efficient tactile “display” that can reproduce as closely as possible the natural feel of an object. This can directly affect the immersive experience. Much research is still needed to reduce the form-factor of tactile displays without compromising transducer strength, spatial resolution, and bandwidth. Tactile displays incorporated in haptic hand wearables from Meta Reality Labs Research and Haptx are tethered because the actuators are based on pneumatic technology. It would be a great contribution to developing an untethered haptic hand wearable with high-resolution tactile displays that enable the user to move freely, especially when using a VR headset. Spatial computing and robotics group at Liverpool Hope teamed up to develop an untethered haptic hand wearable to perceive haptic perception in tele robotics/VR based experiments.

In the press

Our work is featured in national and international media

Liverpool Echo: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/special-features/researcher-turns-1-make-up-19857219
Techxplore magazine: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-sensor-mimics-automatic-human-reaction.html
News Update: https://newsupdate.uk/sensor-mimics-automatic-human-reaction-to-heat-could-herald-soft-robots-of-the-future/

Recent publications

Selected recent publications

Journals:

IEEE sensors journal: Abad, Alexander C., David Reid, and Anuradha Ranasinghe. "HaptiTemp: A Next-Generation Thermosensitive GelSight-like Visuotactile Sensor." IEEE Sensors Journal (2021)
· IEEE sensors journal: Abad, Alexander C., and Anuradha Ranasinghe. "Visuotactile sensors with emphasis on GelSight sensor: A review." IEEE Sensors Journal 20.14 (2020): 7628-7638
·IEEE Robotics and Automation journal: Ranasinghe, Anuradha, Prokar Dasgupta, Atulya Nagar, and Thrishantha Nanayakkara. "Human Behavioral Metrics of a Predictive Model Emerging During Robot Assisted Following Without Visual Feedback." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 3, no. 3 (2018): 2624-2631
IEEE Transaction on Cybernetics Journal : Ranasinghe, Anuradha, Nantachai Sornkarn, Prokar Dasgupta, Kaspar Althoefer, Jacques Penders, and Thrishantha Nanayakkara. "Salient feature of haptic-based guidance of people in low visibility environments using hard reins." IEEE Transactions on cybernetics 46, no. 2 (2015): 568-579
·PLOS One Journal: Ranasinghe, Anuradha, Prokar Dasgupta, Kaspar Althoefer, and Thrishantha Nanayakkara. "Identification of haptic based guiding using hard reins." PloS one 10, no. 7 (2015): e0132020

Peer-reviewed Conferences

·IEEE sensors, October 2020, Netherland (virtually), 4×4 Fingertip Tactile Matrix Actuator with Edge Detection Scanning ROI Simulator
·IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2020, Paris, France (virtually), Low-cost GelSight with UV Markings: Feature Extraction of Objects Using AlexNet and Optical Flow without 3D Image Reconstruction
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2019, Montreal, Canada, Pilot Study: Low Cost GelSight Sensor

Robotics and Sensors

Emanuele Lindo Secco

Robotics

Robotics is on the cusp of an exciting new era as robots are becoming more reactive, intelligent and human-like, as well as finding applications in a range of industries including consumer and healthcare robotics.

For this reason, we have embedded the latest cutting-edge technologies in a new Robotics Laboratory and the latest cutting-edge expertise in a Robotics Team.

In the Robotics Lab, you can experiment and interact with computers running industry-standard and up-to-date specialist software (e.g. Matlab, Visual Studio, 3D Studio Max), Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality interfaces (e.g. Oculus Rift), exotic robots and 3D printing facilities.

The Robotics Team bring together inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary research interests with substantial experiences in the fields of UAV, Artificial Intelligence, Bio-mimetics, Robotics and Sensors, as well as Computer Science and Informatics.

We aims to facilitate research endeavour into Intelligent Systems, UAV, Biologically Inspired devices, Drones and Robots. Our Team has been recognised as an established Research Group within the University. Staff have collaborative links with researchers at other national and international universities, companies and research centres.

The underlying philosophy motivating our research is to apply, besides traditional techniques, novel methods to problems of robot navigation, human robot interaction, sensor perception and integration.

Recent publications

Emanuele Lindo Secco's publications
Orcid
Goodle Scholar
Linkedin
Research Gate
Loop Frontiers

In the press

Ranasinghe's resume

https://www.hope.ac.uk/si/dr-anuradha-ranasinghe.html

Reid's resume

https://www.hope.ac.uk/si/professor-david-reid.html

Secco's resume

Emanuele Lindo Secco received the MSc in Engineering @UNIPD (IT) in 1998, PhD in Bio-Engineering @UNIPV (IT) in 2001, Post-doc in Rehabilitation Robotics @NORTHWESTERN (USA) in 2004. From 2003 to 2014 he worked at RIC (USA), UNIBO (IT), EUCENTRE (IT), KCL (UK) and joined LHU (UK) in 2015. His main interests are on robotics, life-like systems, wearable technologies.

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