In this work, we propose a framework to deal with cross-modal visuo-tactile object recognition. By crossmodal visuo-tactile object recognition, we mean that the object recognition algorithm is trained only with visual data and is able to recognize objects leveraging only tactile perception. The proposed cross-modal framework is constituted by three main elements. The first is a unified representation of visual and tactile data, which is suitable for cross-modal perception. The second is a set of features able to encode the chosen representation for classification applications. The third is a supervised learning algorithm, which takes advantage of the chosen descriptor. In order to show the results of our approach, we performed experiments with 15 objects common in domestic and industrial environments. Moreover, we compare the performance of the proposed framework with the performance of 10 humans in a simple cross-modal recognition task.
In this work, we introduce the problem of crossmodal visuo-tactile object recognition with robotic active exploration. With this term, we mean that the robot observes a set of objects with visual perception and, later on, it is able to recognize such objects only with tactile exploration, without having touched any object before. Using a machine learning terminology, in our application we have a visual training set and a tactile test set, or vice versa. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach constituted by four steps: finding a visuotactile common representation, defining a suitable set of features, transferring the features across the domains, and classifying the objects. We show the results of our approach using a set of 15 objects, collecting 40 visual examples and five tactile examples for each object. The proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 94.7%, which is comparable with the accuracy of the monomodal case, i.e., when using visual data both as training set and test set. Moreover, it performs well compared to the human ability, which we have roughly estimated carrying out an experiment with ten participants.
Purpose of Review The review presents an overview of research approaches on human-robot interfaces in industrial and service robotics. Recent Findings Research approaches address especially speech and gesture recognition in both fields but are more explored in service robotics. However, the importance of interfaces in industrial robots increases. Summary The development of human-robot interfaces is leading towards intuitive interfaces, especially using speech and gesture recognition and combining them to multimodal interfaces.
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