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How the Environment Shapes Tactile Sensing: Understanding the Relationship Between Tactile Filters and Surrounding Environment.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Maiolino, Perla 
Iida, Fumiya 

Abstract

The mechanical properties of a sensor strongly affect its tactile sensing capabilities. By exploiting tactile filters, mechanical structures between the sensing unit and the environment, it is possible to tune the interaction dynamics with the surrounding environment. But how can we design a good tactile filter? Previously, the role of filters' geometry and stiffness on the quality of the tactile data has been the subject of several studies, both implementing static filters and adaptable filters. State-of-the-art works on online adaptive stiffness highlight a crucial role of the filters' mechanical behavior in the structure of the recorded tactile data. However, the relationship between the filter's and the environment's characteristics is still largely unknown. We want to show the effect of the environment's mechanical properties on the structure of the acquired tactile data and the performance of a classification task while testing a wide range of static tactile filters. Moreover, we fabricated the filters using four materials commonly exploited in soft robotics, to merge the gap between tactile sensing and robotic applications. We collected data from the interaction with a standard set of twelve objects of different materials, shapes, and textures, and we analyzed the effect of the filter's material on the structure of such data and the performance of nine common machine learning classifiers, both considering the overall test set and the three individual subsets made by all objects of the same material. We showed that depending on the material of the test objects, there is a drastic change in the performance of the four tested filters, and that the filter that matches the mechanical properties of the environment always outperforms the others.

Description

Keywords

embodied intelligence, environment interaction, morphological computation, soft robotics, soft sensing, tactile filters, tactile sensing

Journal Title

Front Robot AI

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2296-9144
2296-9144

Volume Title

Publisher

Frontiers Media
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Marie Sk?odowska-Curie actions (860108)
This work was supported by the SMART project, European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (grant agreement ID 860108).