Finger Based Explorations

In this paper we shall present new strategies for extracting tactile primitives: hardness, texture and geometric features. The novelty comes from the use of a finger shaped very much like the human finger, which incorporates a ferroelectric polymer-based tactile sensor. It is contrasted with the standard flat shaped tactile pads currently commercially available. In particular, the flatly shaped feelers are limited in their exploration of cavities. Hence our experiments will concentrate on examples of various cavities. We shall use vision for making hypotheses on the existence of the cavity and then use tactile exploration not only for verification but also for determination of the exact profile of the cavity. The latter is known to be very difficult to obtain solely by vision, since cavities, especially deep ones, usually do not reflect much light.