A General Classifier of Whisker Data Using Stationary Naive Bayes: Application to BIOTACT Robots

A general problem in robotics is how to best utilize sensors to classify the robot’s environment. The BIOTACT project (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal Active Touch) is a collaboration between biologists and engineers that has led to many distinctive robots with artificial whisker sensing capabilities. One problem is to construct classifiers that can recognize a wide range of whisker sensations rather than constructing different classifiers for specific features. In this article, we demonstrate that a stationary naive Bayes classifier can perform such a general classification by applying it to various robot experiments. This classifier could be a key component of a robot able to learn autonomously about novel environments, where classifier properties are not known in advance.