Biomimetic whiskers for shape recognition
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
SCRATCHbot: active tactile sensing in a whiskered mobile robot
SAB'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Simulation of adaptive behavior: from animals to animats
SCRATCHbot: active tactile sensing in a whiskered mobile robot
SAB'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Simulation of adaptive behavior: from animals to animats
A general classifier of whisker data using stationary naive bayes: application to BIOTACT robots
TAROS'11 Proceedings of the 12th Annual conference on Towards autonomous robotic systems
Mapping with sparse local sensors and strong hierarchical priors
TAROS'11 Proceedings of the 12th Annual conference on Towards autonomous robotic systems
Towards hierarchical blackboard mapping on a whiskered robot
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
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Rats and other whiskered mammals are capable of making sophisticated sensory discriminations using tactile signals from their facial whiskers (vibrissae). As part of a programme of work to develop biomimetic technologies for vibrissal sensing, including whiskered robots, we are devising algorithms for the fast extraction of object parameters from whisker deflection data. Previous work has demonstrated that radial distance to contact can be estimated from forces measured at the base of the whisker shaft. We show that in the case of a moving object contacting a whisker, the measured force can be ambiguous in distinguishing a nearby object moving slowly from a more distant object moving rapidly. This ambiguity can be resolved by simultaneously extracting object position and speed from the whisker deflection time series - that is by attending to the dynamics of the whisker's interaction with the object. We compare a simple classifier with an adaptive EM (Expectation Maximisation) classifier. Both systems are effective at simultaneously extracting the two parameters, the EM-classifier showing similar performance to a handpicked template classifier. We propose that adaptive classification algorithms can provide insights into the types of computations performed in the rat vibrissal system when the animal is faced with a discrimination task.