Dynamic Potential Fields for Dexterous Tactile Exploration

Haptic exploration of unknown objects is of great importance for acquiring multimodal object representations, which enable a humanoid robot to autonomously execute grasping and manipulation tasks. In this paper we present our ongoing work on tactile object exploration with an anthropomorphic five-finger robot hand. In particular we present a method for guiding the hand along the surface of an unknown object to acquire a 3D object representation from tactile contact data. The proposed method is based on the dynamic potential fields which have originally been suggested in the context of mobile robot navigation. In addition we give first results on how to extract grasp affordances of unknown objects and how to perform object recognition based on the acquired 3D point sets.