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TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas

Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the physical surface properties of the object with which it is in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance of their fixed surface when they are...

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Autores principales: Cao, Guanqun, Jiang, Jiaqi, Lu, Chen, Gomes, Daniel Fernandes, Luo, Shan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10007629/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36904864
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23052661
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author Cao, Guanqun
Jiang, Jiaqi
Lu, Chen
Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Luo, Shan
author_facet Cao, Guanqun
Jiang, Jiaqi
Lu, Chen
Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Luo, Shan
author_sort Cao, Guanqun
collection PubMed
description Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the physical surface properties of the object with which it is in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance of their fixed surface when they are applied with relative motions to the object, current tactile sensors have to tap the tactile sensor on the target object a great number of times when assessing a large surface, i.e., pressing, lifting up, and shifting to another region. This process is ineffective and time-consuming. It is also undesirable to drag such sensors as this often damages the sensitive membrane of the sensor or the object. To address these problems, we propose a roller-based optical tactile sensor named TouchRoller, which can roll around its centre axis. It maintains being in contact with the assessed surface throughout the entire motion, allowing for efficient and continuous measurement. Extensive experiments showed that the TouchRoller sensor can cover a textured surface of 8 cm × 11 cm in a short time of 10 s, much more effectively than a flat optical tactile sensor (in 196 s). The reconstructed map of the texture from the collected tactile images has a high Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.31 on average when compared with the visual texture. In addition, the contacts on the sensor can be localised with a low localisation error, 2.63 mm in the centre regions and 7.66 mm on average. The proposed sensor will enable the fast assessment of large surfaces with high-resolution tactile sensing and the effective collection of tactile images.
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spelling pubmed-100076292023-03-12 TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas Cao, Guanqun Jiang, Jiaqi Lu, Chen Gomes, Daniel Fernandes Luo, Shan Sensors (Basel) Article Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the physical surface properties of the object with which it is in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance of their fixed surface when they are applied with relative motions to the object, current tactile sensors have to tap the tactile sensor on the target object a great number of times when assessing a large surface, i.e., pressing, lifting up, and shifting to another region. This process is ineffective and time-consuming. It is also undesirable to drag such sensors as this often damages the sensitive membrane of the sensor or the object. To address these problems, we propose a roller-based optical tactile sensor named TouchRoller, which can roll around its centre axis. It maintains being in contact with the assessed surface throughout the entire motion, allowing for efficient and continuous measurement. Extensive experiments showed that the TouchRoller sensor can cover a textured surface of 8 cm × 11 cm in a short time of 10 s, much more effectively than a flat optical tactile sensor (in 196 s). The reconstructed map of the texture from the collected tactile images has a high Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.31 on average when compared with the visual texture. In addition, the contacts on the sensor can be localised with a low localisation error, 2.63 mm in the centre regions and 7.66 mm on average. The proposed sensor will enable the fast assessment of large surfaces with high-resolution tactile sensing and the effective collection of tactile images. MDPI 2023-02-28 /pmc/articles/PMC10007629/ /pubmed/36904864 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23052661 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Cao, Guanqun
Jiang, Jiaqi
Lu, Chen
Gomes, Daniel Fernandes
Luo, Shan
TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title_full TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title_fullStr TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title_full_unstemmed TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title_short TouchRoller: A Rolling Optical Tactile Sensor for Rapid Assessment of Textures for Large Surface Areas
title_sort touchroller: a rolling optical tactile sensor for rapid assessment of textures for large surface areas
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10007629/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36904864
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23052661
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