Tactile Pattern Super Resolution with Taxel-based Sensors

Abstract

In contrast to sophisticated means of visual su-per resolution (SR), not much work has been done in the tactile SR field. Existing tactile SR algorithms for taxel-based sensors mainly focus on enhancing the localization accuracy, and generally associate with a specific type of hardware, sometimes not applicable to generic taxel-based tactile sensors. Inspired by image SR, we investigate the tactile pattern SR in this paper, and present how to transform successful image SR schemes, e.g. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to serve the tactile SR. We propose two tactile SR models, i.e. TactileSRCNN and TactileSRGAN, and establish a new tactile pattern SR dataset for model learning. The ground truth of high resolution (HR) tactile patterns in the dataset is obtained via multi-sampling (i.e. overlapping reception) and registration of low resolution (LR) sensor. One key contribution of this research lies in achieving ×100 (from 3×4×4 to 40×40) times tactile pattern SR with a one-time tapping of 3-axis taxel-based sensor. Different from existing tactile SR algorithms which improves the localization accuracy of a single contact point, the proposed scheme can provide multi-point contact detection to robotic applications.