Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to allow humans and robots to interact safely. The control system uses arm sensors that can “read” a person’s muscle movements. The sensors send information to a robot, allowing it to anticipate a human’s movements and correct its own.
“The problem is that a person’s muscle stiffness is never constant, and a robot doesn’t always know how to correctly react,” says Jun Ueda, a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.