Shaking eases Object Category Acquisition: Experiments with a Robot Arm

This paper introduces a synthetic study which investigates the role of shaking behavior in object category acquisition. By shaking objects with several holding positions and obtaining the amplitude spectrums of the auditory signal, a robot with poor control ability can acquire object categories such as rigid objects, paper materials, and PET bottles with water. The result indicates the possiblity that dynamic touch is more effective for categorization than static touch such as grasping since they provide the agent with the information of the whole object enabling them to acquire object categories independent of size, shape, and contact condition.