HBS-1.2: Lightweight Socially Assistive Robot with 6-Ply Twisted Coiled Polymer Muscle-Actuated Hand
, Darshan Palani 1,2, Onan Ahmed 1,2, Pawandeep Singh Matharu 1,2, Tristan Linn 1,2, Trung Nguyen 3 and Yonas Tadesse 1,2,4,5,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Abhishek Pratap Singh et al fabricated socially assistive robot (SAR) using polymeric artificial muscle. The artificial muscle is prepared by twisting and coiling 6 plies of polymer threads. This coiling method for artificial muscle is reported by Ray Baughman at UT Dallas a long time ago. It’s great to see that this type of polymeric artificial muscle is used to fabricate SAR. I am favorable for publication of this manuscript in Actuators. However, display and quality of figures are below the average in typical scientific journal papers. Below are comments to further improve the manuscript.
First of all, supporting videos will be very helpful and more powerful to effectively show the actuation to readers. Include several videos for important actuations.
This manuscript has 21 Figures, but it seems that not all the figures are necessary. For example, Figure 1 is based on the other literatures and the information can be simply mentioned in the main text. In the main text, the manuscript already says “As shown in Figure 1, the number of Americans aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s dementia is projected to grow from the current estimated prevalence of 6.2 million in 2021 up to 13.8 million by 2060 [1].”
It seems that Figure 2 is more suitable for review papers than the research article. This can be listed up in the main text.
Figure 5 shows the result of the cycle tests. Although authors claim that initial 10 mm is decreased to 7 mm after 1000 cycles. However, first reach to 7 mm occurred at ~ 620 cycles. At ~920 cycles, the displacement decreased even to ~5.6 mm. Instead of using maximum value for cycle stability, more conservative number is recommended. Why did the displacement increase to ~ 7 mm at 1000 cycles? Authors have no discussion for reasons why displacement decreases. Add discussion for origin of displacement decrease.
In Figure 9, simulated response and experimental results are demonstrated in two different graphs. For easier read and direct comparison, I recommend authors to merge two graphs into one.
As shown in Figure 19, the age for the survey is very limited. It’s mostly age between 18 and 25. Above 35 is only 4 people and this might affect the results. For example, Q4 is asking the need for on-board touch-screen display and input. Only 5 people are negative for this question but there is a possibility that 4 out of 5 people are in the category of above 35. Considering the fact that SAR is more beneficial for older people, it will be important to add survey results from older people and provide more information in the Supporting Information of the manuscript.
Minor formatting issues
- Figure quality
Some figures have low graph/image quality.
Figure 4 has low quality texts in the graph. As same legends are used for four graphs, authors do not need to repeat it four times, but can delete other three legends.
- Keep consistency throughout the manuscript.
“With a rising number of elderly patients requiring care, there is an increasing demand for dementia care services [1, 2].”
“However, the caregiving workforce is diminishing, and most elderly care in the US is provided by informal and unpaid caregivers[3, 4] .”
There space between the word “services” and “[1, 2]” while there is no space in “caregivers[3, 4] .” Also, there is unnecessary space between “[3, 4]” and period.
Similar issue is found from “Although current humanoid robots such as Pepper[6], Stevie [7], Care-O-Bot [8] have advanced features to enable improved interactions with humans, they still have limitations for application in a home setting.”
I am not going to list up all the issues but there are similar issues in the manuscript.
Author Response
Attached
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Editor,
In this article, authors have proposed use of TCP polymer as an artificial muscle in the hand of SARs robot. Authors have clearly defined their goal and performed sufficient experiment and characterization to demonstrate the use of TCP as an artificial muscle. Authors have also compared the benefits and limitation of TCP system against other artificial muscle system. This is very helpful for the wide audience and good platform for the further development of TCP as an artificial muscle. I would like to recommend to this article to publish in the journal ‘Actuators’ with no further changes
Author Response
Attached
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
