Computational Intelligence Techniques for Tactile Sensing Systems
Paolo Gastaldo,
Luigi Pinna,
Lucia Seminara,
Maurizio Valle,
Rodolfo Zunino
Affiliations
Paolo Gastaldo
Department of Electric, Electronic, Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture, DITEN, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, Italy
Luigi Pinna
Department of Electric, Electronic, Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture, DITEN, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, Italy
Lucia Seminara
Department of Electric, Electronic, Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture, DITEN, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, Italy
Maurizio Valle
Department of Electric, Electronic, Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture, DITEN, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, Italy
Rodolfo Zunino
Department of Electric, Electronic, Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture, DITEN, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, Italy
Tactile sensing helps robots interact with humans and objects effectively in real environments. Piezoelectric polymer sensors provide the functional building blocks of the robotic electronic skin, mainly thanks to their flexibility and suitability for detecting dynamic contact events and for recognizing the touch modality. The paper focuses on the ability of tactile sensing systems to support the challenging recognition of certain qualities/modalities of touch. The research applies novel computational intelligence techniques and a tensor-based approach for the classification of touch modalities; its main results consist in providing a procedure to enhance system generalization ability and architecture for multi-class recognition applications. An experimental campaign involving 70 participants using three different modalities in touching the upper surface of the sensor array was conducted, and confirmed the validity of the approach.
