Identifying Relevant Tactile Features for Object Identification

Schöpfer M, Pardowitz M, Haschke R, Ritter H. Identifying Relevant Tactile Features for Object Identification. In: Prassler E, Bischoff R, Burgard W, et al., eds. Towards Service Robots for Everyday Environments. Recent Advances In Designing Service Robots For Complex Tasks In Everyday Environments. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Vol 76. Berlin: Springer; 2012: 417-430.Tactile sensing arrays for robotic applications become more and more popular these days. This allows us to equip robots with sensing abilities similar to those of our human skin. This article presents an approach to tactile-based recognition of objects and evaluates the utility of various feature extractors for tactile processing. Extracting these features from a tactile database, we describe a system that combines a discretization step with the well-known C4.5 algorithm in an object classification task. We analyze the usefulness of the features in terms of entropy-based considerations, taking into account the generated decision trees and report our results that give important hints for feature selection