Tactual Imaging of Object's Surfaces Using a Tactile Sensor

This paper describes about haptic aspects and these graph representation of tactual images. As the acquisitions of tactual images are carried out by the tactile sensings onto an object's surface, it is necessary to provide with the representation of the tactual images due to the geometric relationships with the features of an object's surface. The haptic aspects are defined as the equivalence classes corresponding to the tactual images which are classified by the equivalence relations to image set acquired by the tactile sensings with any exploring directions onto a given object's features. The haptic aspect graph representation is done as a graph for the geometric relationships of the haptic aspects which are classified with the tactual images for the features of the object's shape; edges, faces, vertices, and concave features. A high density optical tactile sensor has been developed for acquiring the tactual images from the object's surface. The pose control of the object's face are confirmed by usingg the normal vector of the face which is estimated from the tactual images acquired by the optical tactile sensor.