Human-Touch-Inspired Material Recognition for Robotic Tactile Sensing

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel material recognition method for robotic tactile sensing. The method is composed of two steps. Firstly, a human-touch-inspired short-duration (1 s) slide action is conducted by the robot to obtain the tactile data. Then, the tactile data is processed with a machine learning algorithm, where 11 bioinspired features were designed to imitate the mechanical stimuli towards the four main types of tactile receptors in the skin. In this paper, a material database consisting of 144,000 tactile images is used to train seven classifiers, and the most accurate classifier is selected to recognize 12 household objects according to their properties and materials. In the property recognition, the materials are classified into 4 categories according to their compliance and texture, and the best accuracy reaches 96% in 36 ms. In the material recognition, the specific materials are recognized, and the best accuracy reaches 90% in 37 ms. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Novel Untethered Hand Wearable with Fine-Grained Cutaneous Haptic Feedback

“…One of the goals of haptics research is to develop an effective and efficient tactile "display" for a human-machine interface that can reproduce as closely as possible the natural feel of an object. Tactile displays are not only for vision substitution systems [20,25], but they can also be used to enhance the immersive experience in telecommunications or teleoperations [36,37], biomedical engineering [6], telerobotics [38], material recognition [39], online shopping [7], human-computer interaction (HCI) [19,40,41], and VR environments [18,24].…”

4×4 Fingertip Tactile Matrix Actuator with Edge Detection Scanning ROI Simulator

“…Research on haptics and tactile transducers is an interdisciplinary field that covers perception [1], psychophysics [2], vision substitution system for the blind and visually impaired [3], [4], virtual reality (VR), mechanism design and control, bio-medical engineering, mobile communication [5], telerobotics [6], [7], material recognition [8], and humancomputer interaction (HCI) [9].…”