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Extended Tactile Perception: Vibration Sensing through Tools and Grasped Objects
Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and
other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a
held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work,
we consider how we can enable robots to have a similar capacity, i.e., to
embody tools and extend perception using standard grasped objects. We propose
that vibro-tactile sensing using dynamic tactile sensors on the robot fingers,
along with machine learning models, enables robots to decipher contact
information that is transmitted as vibrations along rigid objects. This paper
reports on extensive experiments using the BioTac micro-vibration sensor and a
new event dynamic sensor, the NUSkin, capable of multi-taxel sensing at 4~kHz.
We demonstrate that fine localization on a held rod is possible using our
approach (with errors less than 1 cm on a 20 cm rod). Next, we show that
vibro-tactile perception can lead to reasonable grasp stability prediction
during object handover, and accurate food identification using a standard fork.
We find that multi-taxel vibro-tactile sensing at sufficiently high sampling
rate led to the best performance across the various tasks and objects. Taken
together, our results provides both evidence and guidelines for using
vibro-tactile perception to extend tactile perception, which we believe will
lead to enhanced competency with tools and better physical
human-robot-interaction.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. This version adds additional related work and
updated result