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High-Speed Tactile Braille Reading via Biomimetic Sliding Interactions

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Potdar, Parth 
Hardman, David 
Almanzor, Elijah 
Iida, Fumiya 

Abstract

Most braille-reading robotic sensors employ a discrete letter-by-letter reading strategy, despite the higher potential speeds of a biomimetic sliding approach. We propose a complete pipeline for continuous braille reading: frames are dynamically collected with a vision-based tactile sensor; an autoencoder removes motion-blurring artefacts; a lightweight YOLO v8 model classifies the braille characters; and a data-driven consolidation stage minimizes errors in the predicted string. We demonstrate a state-of-the-art speed of 315 words per minute at 87.5% accuracy, more than twice the speed of human braille reading. Whilst demonstrated on braille, this biomimetic sliding approach can be further employed for richer dynamic spatial and temporal detection of surface textures, and we consider the challenges which must be addressed in its development.

Description

Keywords

46 Information and Computing Sciences, 40 Engineering, 4009 Electronics, Sensors and Digital Hardware, Bioengineering, Biotechnology

Journal Title

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2377-3766
2377-3766

Volume Title

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Sponsorship
EPSRC (2434612)
This work was supported by the Samsung Global Research Outreach Program (GRO G118293), and by by EPSRC DTP EP/R513180/1.