Texture classification through tactile sensing

To perform tasks in human-centric environments, humanoid robots should have the ability to interact with and learn from their environment through the sense of touch. In humans, the loss of this capability can be catastrophic - for instance, the absence of a proprioception sense of limb movement can result in a dramatic loss of the precision and speed of hand movements. Furthermore, not only humans but also animals use tactile sensing to explore their environment, with one notable example being the tapping exploration known as whisking performed by rats with their long facial vibrissae. The movement of tactile sensors against an object surface to generate tactile information is known as active tactile sensing because it relies on actively moving the sensor to generate the tactile sensations. Humans make use of different exploratory procedures (EPs) to extract key information of the objects (e.g. tapping, contour following). It is of great interest how humans and animals develop and select these EPs [6], which motivates the present study into integrating these biomimetic properties within a robotic system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag