Biology to Technology in Active Touch Sensing - Introduction to the Special Section

The six papers included in this special section address the diverse challenges of active touch sensing in robots, humans, or other animals. Of these, two papers address tactile sensing in non-human animals, two papers concern tactile behavior for artificial human hands those of robots or of upper limb prostheses, one paper provides a comparative examination of three paradigms for active touch with biomimetic whiskers and fingertips, and one paper focuses on active touch sensing of surface texture in humans. Together, these papers highlight the breadth of research in the field, and the extent of cross-disciplinary inquiry that is frequently involved.

[1]  Nicholas J. Butko,et al.  Active perception , 2010 .

[2]  Mark R. Cutkosky,et al.  Force and Tactile Sensors , 2008, Springer Handbook of Robotics.

[3]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  Whisking with robots , 2009, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[4]  David Kleinfeld,et al.  Active sensation: insights from the rodent vibrissa sensorimotor system , 2006, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[5]  Mitra J Z Hartmann,et al.  Active touch, exploratory movements, and sensory prediction. , 2009, Integrative and comparative biology.

[6]  M. Diamond,et al.  Whisker sensory system – From receptor to decision , 2013, Progress in Neurobiology.

[7]  R. Klatzky,et al.  Hand movements: A window into haptic object recognition , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[8]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  From Rat Vibrissae to Biomimetic Technology for Active Touch , 2009 .

[9]  S. B. Vincent The function of the vibrissae in the behavior of the white rat , 1912 .

[10]  John Cohen The World of Touch , 1952, Nature.

[11]  Florence Richardson A study of the sensory control in the rat. , 1909 .

[12]  Nathan F. Lepora Active tactile perception , 2015, Scholarpedia.

[13]  J. Gibson Observations on active touch. , 1962, Psychological review.

[14]  A. Wing,et al.  Active touch sensing , 2011, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[15]  Ieee Robotics IEEE transactions on haptics , 2008 .

[16]  Peter K. Allen,et al.  Mapping haptic exploratory procedures to multiple shape representations , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[17]  Nathan F. Lepora,et al.  The effect of whisker movement on radial distance estimation: a case study in comparative robotics , 2013, Front. Neurorobot..

[18]  Gerald E. Loeb,et al.  Bayesian Exploration for Intelligent Identification of Textures , 2012, Front. Neurorobot..