Active Whisker Placement and Exploration for Rapid Object Recognition

Abstract

Identifying objects using sparse tactile sensor arrays requires movement across the surface and the integration of sensory information to support hypotheses. In this study we demonstrate a surface placement control strategy to orient and position a biomimetic tactile whisker array relative to the object surface. This reduces the variance in tactile view, or representation, of each region of the object surface thus relaxing the prior pose dependence for object recall. In addition we evaluate two regional search strategies in an attempt to further improve the robustness and speed of object classification.