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Soft Morphological Processing of Tactile Stimuli for Autonomous Category Formation

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Maiolino, Perla 

Abstract

Sensor morphology is a fundamental aspect of tactile sensing technology. Design choices induce stimuli to be morphologically processed, changing the sensory perception of the touched objects and affecting inference at a later processing stage. We develop a framework to analyze the filtered sensor response and observe the correspondent change in tactile information. We test the morphological processing effects on the tactile stimuli by integrating a capacitive tactile sensor into a flat end-effector and creating three soft silicon-based filters with varying thickness (3mm, 6mm and 10mm). We incorporate the end-effector onto a robotic arm. We control the arm in order to apply a calibrated force onto 4 objects, and retrieve tactile images. We create an unsupervised inference process through the use of Principal Component Analysis and K-Means Clustering.We use the process to group the sensed objects into 2 classes and observe how different soft filters affect the clustering results. The sensor response with the 3mm soft filter allows for edges to be the feature with most variance (captured by PCA) and induces the association of edged objects. With thicker soft filters the associations change, and with a 10mm filter the sensor response results more diverse for objects with different elongation. We show that the clustering is intrinsically driven by the morphology of the sensor and that the robot’s world understanding changes according to it.

Description

Keywords

46 Information and Computing Sciences, 40 Engineering, 4016 Materials Engineering, 4009 Electronics, Sensors and Digital Hardware

Journal Title

2018 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)

Conference Name

RoboSoft 2018- IEEE RAS International Conference

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE
Sponsorship
Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) (CP 172)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N029003/1)
This work was funded by the UK Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and by The United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) MOTION grant [EP/N03211X/2].