Deep GRU-ensembles for active tactile texture recognition with soft, distributed skin sensors in dynamic contact scenarios

Andreas Geier, Gang Yan, Tito Pradhono Tomo, Sophon Somlor, Shigeki Sugano

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Tactile feedback is an important sensory information that contributes to our ability to perform various manipulation tasks. Soft sensor skin aims at providing, e.g., anthropomorphic robot hands with the sense of touch to resemble this ability in teleoperation or prosthetic applications. However, the exploration of an objects texture using a robot hand involves various dynamic contact scenarios. Depending on the relative dynamics between the soft sensor skin and the object, the difficulty and the dimensionality of the recognition task changes dynamically during the manipulation of an object. We deployed a deep gated recurrent unit (GRU)-ensemble with unweighted averaging that allows the texture recognition algorithm to dynamically scale with the number of contact points during active tactile texture exploration while maintaining a high accuracy. We experimentally verify the approach by evaluating the prediction performance of the GRU-ensemble on the data that was gathered during the active tactile exploration of four objects of daily living by means of a uSkin sensor module providing up to 16 3-axis force vectors at 100Hz sampling frequency. The accuracy of 100% suggests that deep GRU-ensembles offer a scalable option for reliable texture recognition in active tactile exploration for the implementation into tactile feedback systems.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2020 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, SII 2020
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages127-132
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781728166674
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020 Jan
Event2020 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, SII 2020 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 2020 Jan 122020 Jan 15

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2020 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, SII 2020

Conference

Conference2020 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, SII 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period20/1/1220/1/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Control and Optimization
  • Instrumentation

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