Robotic Whiskers Sense Shape and Texture

An AC writes,"NewScientistTech has a story about robotic whiskers capable of sensing shape and texture in a similar way to those belonging to rats and seals. The 'bending moment,' or torque, exerted at the base of each whisker is used to extract feature information. The artificial whiskers could be used on interplanetary rovers, or allow underwater vehicles to track moving objects by their wake. Check out the slightly creepy video of them stroking a sculpted face."

Comments

Re:Moo

[prichardson]

Assuming the existence of God:

If God had taken out patents, people would be able to reference them, a good thing. We could probably cure cancer, and the whole Human Genome thing wouldn't have been necessary.

Also, they would have expired twenty years after they were granted, so they'd be public domain now anyway.

If only God actually HAD taken out patents...

Re:interesting point //Re:Um..Really lame video

[ortholattice]

Yes, the video should be viewed in the context of the final image it reconstructs. Once you see the final image - shown on the article page for the 99% of readers who clicked on the video but didn't RTFA (a hyperlink labeled "video" being the /. equivalent of "ooh, shiny button") - it is pretty damn impressive that the information can be extracted from such "crude"-looking stroking. Although it's somewhat eerie that the original sculpture looks vaguely "female", whereas the reconstructed image looks vaguely "male". Also, the video was painful to look at - I grimaced at the thought of that thing poking me in the eye...

Question

[tygerstripes]

Hi,

Thanks for posting - it is a really interesting concept and I'm glad you're doing the work (though if you need another test-dummy, count me out please). I hope you'll post another article once you've got a shiny real-time working model that maps onto a monitor - this is slashdot after all :-P

I have a question though. Is the length of the whiskers pre-defined in constructing the image? Mammal whiskers are always growing, falling out, getting clipped (burned, in my cat's case - "ooh, that candle looks shiny..."), but they learn how to interpret and adapt to their whisker-sense. Presumably at this early stage it would be impossible to generate appropriate feedback for such learning, but do you intend to have similar learning algorithms going on with your whiskers at a later stage? With something as independent and unmaintainable as rovers, I would think it critical to account for whisker-damage in this way.

Another point that interests me is that of whisker-friction. If the whiskers could sense whether they were being "pulled" or not by friction on a surface, that might provide some useful (or at least interesting) information on the texture of an object, and wouldn't add significantly to the weight or complexity of the sensing apparatus, I suspect.

I'd be really interested to hear what you think.