Fork in hand, a robot arm skewers a strawberry from above and delivers it to Tyler Schrenk’s mouth. Sitting in his wheelchair, Schrenk nudges his neck forward to take a bite. Next, the arm goes for a slice of banana, then a carrot. Each motion it performs by itself, on Schrenk’s spoken command.
For Schrenk, who became paralysed from the neck down after a diving accident in 2012, such a device would make a huge difference in his daily life if it were in his home. “Getting used to someone else feeding me was one of the strangest things I had to transition to,” he says. “It would definitely help with my well-being and my mental health.”
His home is already fitted with voice-activated power switches and door openers, enabling him to be independent for about 10 hours a day without a caregiver. “I’ve been able to figure most of this out,” he says. “But feeding on my own is not something I can do.” Which is why he wanted to test the feeding robot, dubbed ADA (short for assistive dexterous arm). Cameras located above the fork enable ADA to see what to pick up. But knowing how forcefully to stick a fork into a soft banana or a crunchy carrot, and how tightly to grip the utensil, requires a sense that humans take for granted: “Touch is key,” says Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, a roboticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the design of ADA while at the University of Washington in Seattle. The robot’s two fingers are equipped with sensors that measure the sideways (or shear) force when holding the fork1. The system is just one example of a growing effort to endow robots with a sense of touch.
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