ARTICLE
9
Robotic touch Can robots be made to have tactile sensing? by leong yoke Peng
T
hree decades ago, Roberta L. Klatzky and Susan J. Lederman, formally established that people are exceptionally good at detecting and recognising objects, even when tactile sensing is the only method without looking into the bag. However, for a robot, the same task proves to be extremely complex; in addition to the ability to search and take out the key, the robot needs to know what tactile sensing (e.g., the feeling of touching a key) means in terms a computer can express and analyse (i.e., numbers and equations). Aside from intellectual curiosity and personal satisfaction that comes from successfully building a cool robot, we seek to develop intelligent machines or robots because they often perform a task more
Figure 1: A unique feature of a key that human hand recognises is the row of edges on the key blade.
human replacements in areas such as automotive manufacturing, micro-scale fabrication and exploration of remote environments (e.g., space, deep sea, and the Antarctic). One main purpose of these robots is to explore an environment and/or
the next course of action during exploration and manipulation tasks, the robot needs to be able to understand its surroundings and distinguish different objects based on the sensory data it has collected.
surface. For example, when one does not have a prior knowledge about a surface, a sensor (e.g., a robotic hand) might be pushing too hard on the surface destroying the surface to be explored. But, unlike exploration methods that rely on vision and auditory sensors, haptic exploration is not limited by interferences between sensors and objects. When a robot is manipulating an object, the manipulator usually blocks the vision or auditory sensors from fully detecting the object. In such cases, touch based exploration, in which a sensor makes direct contact with the object, is a better choice. WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT ROBOTIC TOUCH? automated machines which can identify objects and its surroundings during exploration and manipulation. It is also valuable for building a more intuitive prosthetic hand that can more precisely mimic the object feature of a key that a human hand recognises is the row of edges on the key blade (Figure 1). Although detecting the edges on the key blade using
“...we seek to develop intelligent machines or robots because they often perform a task more efficiently than us.�
ISSUE 4 / 2012
