Whisker-Based Texture Discrimination on a Mobile Robot

Sensing in the dark is a useful but challenging task both for biological agents and robots. Rats and mice use whiskers for the active exploration of their environment. We have built a robot equipped with two active whisker arrays and tested whether they can provide reliable texture information. While it is relatively easy to classify data recorded at a specified distance and angle to the object, it is more challenging to achieve texture discrimination on a mobile robot. We used a standard neural network classifier to show that it is in principle possible to discriminate textures using whisker sensors even under real-world conditions.

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