Abstract
Conventional visual perception technology is subject to many restrictions, such as illumination, background clutter, and occlusion. Many intrinsic properties of objects, like stiffness, hardness, and internal state, cannot be effectively perceived by visual sensors. For robots, tactile perception is a key approach to obtain environmental and object information. Different from vision sensors, tactile sensors can directly measure some physical properties of objects and environment. At the same time, humans also utilize touch sensory receptors as an important means to perceive and interact with the environment. In this article, we present a detailed discussion on tactile object recognition problem. We divide the current studies on the tactile object recognition into three subcategories and detailed analysis has been put forward on them. In addition, we also discuss some advanced topics such as visual–tactile fusion, exploratory procedure, and data sets.
Highlights
At present, many robots are equipped with visual sensors
The visual sensing is subject to many restrictions in practical applications, such as lighting conditions and occlusions
A representative work can be found in the study by Soh and Demiris,[20] which divides the whole procedure into three stages: (1) open fingers according to some preshape, (2) move the fingers according to some planned path until it contact the objects, and (3) perform exploratory procedure (EP) such as press or squeeze until some termination conditions are satisfied
Summary
Many robots are equipped with visual sensors. the visual sensing is subject to many restrictions in practical applications, such as lighting conditions and occlusions. Different from visual sensing, tactile sensors are capable of perceiving some physical properties (e.g. softness/hardness, texture, temperature) of an object directly. No mature method for data collection and classification is established To help address this problem, Kappassov et al.[5] divided tactile object recognition research into three major categories: tactile object identification, texture recognition, and contact pattern recognition. We adopt different guidelines based on tactile exploratory procedure (EP) which can be used to differentiate the shape of rigid objects, the texture of material surfaces, and the deformation of soft objects. Typical examples of these objects are metal parts, cloth, and fruits, respectively.
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