SkinBot: A Wearable Skin Climbing Robot Artem Dementyev MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA artemd@mit.edu Javier Hernandez MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA javierhr@mit.edu Sean Follmer Stanford Stanford, CA sfollmer@stanford.edu Inrak Choi Stanford Stanford, CA irchoi@stanford.edu Joseph Paradiso MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA joep@mit.edu ABSTRACT We introduce SkinBot; a lightweight robot that moves over the skin surface with a two-legged suction-based locomo- tion mechanism and that captures a wide range of body pa- rameters with an exchangeable multipurpose sensing module. We believe that robots that live on our skin such as Skin- Bot will enable a more systematic study of the human body and will offer great opportunities to advance many areas such as telemedicine, human-computer interfaces, body care, and fashion. Author Keywords Skin, robotics, wearable devices, telemedicine ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information Int. and Presentation: Miscellaneous INTRODUCTION Semi-autonomous robots have become a critical tool for the systematic exploration of challenging scenarios such as the rubble of natural disasters, the bottom of the oceans, or dis- tant planets such as Mars. With a similar philosophy in mind but a significant difference in scale, this work proposes using wearable robots to systematically explore the human body. While there is a large array of instruments and wearables to capture different aspects of the body (e.g., physiology, be- havior), many of the devices still require the direct manipula- tion of an expert practitioner, are usually designed to remain at a specific body location (e.g., chest, wrist), and/or do not have direct access to the skin. To help address these limi- tations, this work leverages the benefits of such instruments with robotics. In particular, we propose and develop SkinBot; a small wearable semi-autonomous robot that lives on the skin surface and provides objective and systematic digitization of Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. UIST’17 Adjunct, October 22–October 25, 2017, Quebec City, QC, Canada. c  2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author´ s. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5419-6/17/10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3131785.3131796 the body. To successfully achieve these goals, SkinBot and similar robots need to satisfy several design considerations such as (1) being lightweight and small, (2) have the ability to move and adhere to the skin, (3) have multimodal sensing and actuation capabilities, and (4) have the ability to commu- nicate with a central control unit or other robots to achieve complex tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to show a functional wearable robot that meets the pre- vious design considerations. PREVIOUS WORK Developing a small robot that can adhere and move over the skin surface is challenging due to many factors such as the elasticity of the skin and many of its irregularities (e.g., wrin- kles, hair). Moreover, the robot needs to be able to adhere irrespective of its orientation and multiple directions of grav- itational forces. Existing approaches have devised successful mechanisms for climbing vertical surfaces, such as magnetic wheels and gecko-like adhesives and suction [2, 4, 6, 8, 10], and other studies have explored cloth-climbing robots using fabric pinching [3, 9] and magnetic rollers or needles for ad- hesion [1, 5]. However, such approaches cannot be easily used on the human skin due to their large size and/or incom- patible adhesion methods. In contrast, this work proposes a robot that circumvents many of the previous challenges. SKINBOT DESIGN With an iterative design process, we designed and developed SkinBot which consists of two main parts: a 2-legged suction- based locomotion system, and an exchangeable multipurpose sensing module. Locomotion. To move over the skin surface, we use a suction-based approach which outperformed other consid- ered methods (e.g., sticky pre-gelled wheels, pinching on the clothes) by covering a larger proportion of the body and bet- ter adapting to some of the skin challenges. In particular, we used an in-house 3D printer (Form 2, Formlabs, Grey resin) to fabricate the suction cups and other custom parts. We added a pressure sensor to each of the cups to detect if the suction cup was or not attached to the skin. The whole locomotion process is controlled by a 21-state machine implemented on a microcontroller. Four micro servo motors (two for each leg)