Tactile Servo Based on Pressure Distribution

Abstract

Tactile sensation is an important perception to enable humans to observe the environment by touch. Then efficient and suitable actions can be performed by the feedback of tactile sensation. In order to acquire human-like dexterity, robot manipulation by tactile sensation, tactile servo, was proposed and developed. In this paper, we propose a new idea for processing tactile images to refine tactile servo, utilizing whole pressure distribution instead of specific tactile features. To validate the feasibility of the proposed method in this paper, experiments were conducted by using the tactile sensing array mounted on the robot to move on the specific object, and the performance is assessed by the normalized cross correlation (NCC). Moreover, comparison with previous method was carried out. The feasibility of tactile servo based on pressure distribution is verified.