Tactile Perception Based on Injected Vibration in Soft Sensor

Tactile perception using vibration sensation helps robots recognize their environment's physical properties and perform complex tasks. A sliding motion is applied to target objects generate tactile data. However, situations exist where such a infeasible due geometrical constraints in the environment or an object's fragility which cannot resist friction forces. This letter explores novel approach achieve vibration-based without motion. To this end, our key idea injecting mechanical into soft sensor system measuring propagated inside it by sensor. Soft sensors are deformed contact state, touched objects' shape texture should change characteristics of propagation. Therefore, propagated-vibration data expected contain useful information for recognizing environments. We developed prototype proof-of-concept: biomimetic (soft vibration-based) from small, mounted piezoelectric actuator. As verification experiment, we performed two classification tasks sandpaper's grit size slit's gap widths compared accuracies with that motions. Our resulted 70% accuracy 99% width classification. These results comparable better than comparison methods