Feeling the Shape: Active Exploration Behaviors for Object Recognition With a Robotic Hand

Martinez-Hernandez, U., DODD, Tony and Prescott, T.J. (2017) Feeling the Shape: Active Exploration Behaviors for Object Recognition With a Robotic Hand. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. ISSN 2168-2216

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Abstract or description

IEEE Autonomous exploration in robotics is a crucial feature to achieve robust and safe systems capable to interact with and recognize their surrounding environment. In this paper, we present a method for object recognition using a three-fingered robotic hand actively exploring interesting object locations to reduce uncertainty. We present a novel probabilistic perception approach with a Bayesian formulation to iteratively accumulate evidence from robot touch. Exploration of better locations for perception is performed by familiarity and novelty exploration behaviors, which intelligently control the robot hand to move toward locations with low and high levels of interestingness, respectively. These are active behaviors that, similar to the exploratory procedures observed in humans, allow robots to autonomously explore locations they believe that contain interesting information for recognition. Active behaviors are validated with object recognition experiments in both offline and real-time modes. Furthermore, the effects of inhibiting the active behaviors are analyzed with a passive exploration strategy. The results from the experiments demonstrate the accuracy of our proposed methods, but also their benefits for active robot control to intelligently explore and interact with the environment.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Active exploration; Bayesian perception; haptics; intrinsic motivation; shape recognition
Faculty:	School of Creative Arts and Engineering > Engineering
Depositing User:	Library STORE team
Date Deposited:	15 Jul 2020 14:46
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2023 13:58
URI:	https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/id/eprint/6234

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