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."

Rats and Seals?

[Blakey Rat (99501)]

I have to tell you that my cat is sitting right here on my desk and she's PISSED!

Re:Rats and Seals?

[MCRocker (461060)]

I have to tell you that my cat is sitting right here on my desk and she's PISSED!

Ewww! That can really mess up your keyboard :(

they make a sound....

[macadamia_harold (947445)]

NewScientistTech has a story about robotic whiskers ... Check out the slightly creepy video of them stroking a sculpted face.

They seem to be making a noise.. it sounds like "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Artificial Skin; Animal-Like Robots?

[Garrett Fox (970174)]

These whiskers tie in with existing research into artificial skin that can "feel." This 2005 NASA article [nasa.gov] describes mecha-skin that uses IR sensors to detect touch. Japanese researchers [bbc.co.uk] (2005) reported having a type that senses temperature and pressure through actual touching.

The skin research should be useful both for robotics and for replacement parts for humans, as an alternative to the clunky biological hand transplants that have been carried out. (I think I'd rather have a Luke Skywalker robot hand than a mismatched corpse's!) These artificial hand researchers [lucs.lu.se] will probably be interested as well, because having a prosthesis that can be sensed as well as controlled is necessary for it to be as good as the original. The big issue is how easy it will be to get these touch signals into the human nervous system in a useful way. For robots, the data can be built into existing software for making maps of a robot's surroundings. I picture a robot rat running a maze with a set of these whiskers. Won't whiskers serve as a low-energy-cost alternative to sonar and other sensing systems?

The odd thing is that here, the research is not into copying human abilities, but those of (nonhuman) animals. I wrote a silly article [anthrozine.com] arguing that future robots will be made to resemble animals, not humans, and Charles Van Doren (in A History of Knowledge) predicted "warm and fuzzy" robotics. Is that where we're headed?

Robotic Whiskers?

[BigRockinDaddy (647253)]

I guess it was just me that read the article and thought, "Hmmm, high-tech curb feelers". Just what the moon rover was missing. Next they can create fuzzy dice that mimic a birds direction sense.

Conspiracy

[suv4x4 (956391)]

I believe this is some sort of real piece of conspiracy going on here.

So QRIO and AIBO were discontinued, but almost every next day you can read about yet another freeky appendage or a robot designer to be inserted up your ass and crawl your intestines.

What are these guys preparing for us !?

Man, I'm so no taking the red pill.

Re:Conspiracy

[suv4x4 (956391)]

or a robot designer to be inserted up your ass

ok.. that was a curious type of typo to make...

I for one...

[commisaro (1007549)]

... welcome out new tentacled robotic overlords.

This is old technology, I did this as a Senior HS

[MrJerryNormandinSir (197432)]

Man this is old stuff. I created wiskers for an Atari 400 computer way back in the early 80s. I was a Sr. In high school.
The wiskers could detect a ball, box, wrench, dog bone, and pencil. Basiclly the wiskers were conductive and protruded through
a conductive metal plate with circular holes for the "wiskers to poke through" Normaly the circuit was open.
When an object brushed against the sensors it will close the circuit and I would detect a pattern. I had many different patterns
stored for each object. T

Re:This is old technology, I did this as a Senior

[SpinyNorman (33776)]

The system described isn't quite the same... the innovation is that they are using 2-D torque sensors on the whiskers, and apparently are able to reconstruct the 3-D surface of the object whiskered using the data... that's a rather major improvement over just detecting a profile with on/off switches! ;-)

Re:

[MrJerryNormandinSir (197432)]

They should have improved on it, man I did this 27 years ago! I wasn't going agter 3D surface reconstruction, I was going after
object recognition, and a self learning applicaiton. This is much more than just detecting a profile.
   

Re:

[Who235 (959706)]

Dragging a model head across the feelers without any feedback wasn't exactly a convincing demo.

I agree.

Plus they should have waited until that Chia-pet was fully developed before subjecting it to the rigors of a lab environment. I suspect that it will never be able to grow a uniform coat of sprouts now, thanks in large part to the creepy whiskers dragged across its face for (no doubt) hours at a time.

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

[by Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the paper.

I think what you are suggesting is that there should be simultaneous video of (1) the whiskers sweeping over the sculpted head, and (2) the computer drawing the image generated by the whiskers. Is that what you mean by "feedback?" If so, you're right, that would be a more convincing video. However, the system doesn't yet operate in real time. Real time operation wasn't our goal. Our goal was to illustrate the basic mechanical principle (bending moment alone gives you all the info you need, even in the presence of significant slip), and to demonstrate that this principle could work for both robots and rats (and seals, underwater)

The video posted here was intended to give an intuitive impression of the size of the whiskers compared to the head, the speed of the whiskers (currently slow, but that could be changed), the extent that the whiskers "slip" when they hit the head. The fact that the whiskers slip so much makes feature extraction really difficult, especially with no force sensors.

Thus, while I understand that you're dissapointed that we didn't have real-time image extraction, I take issue with the epithet "lame" as applied to our video. ;-) Real-time extraction wasn't the point of the paper. But thanks for your comments -- always interesting to hear different perspectives.

Re:

[ortholattice (175065)]

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 vagu

Question

[tygerstripes (832644)]

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 s

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

[by Anonymous Coward]

Remember that the media puts a very different spin on things than scientists and engineers might if they were presenting the work. We have virtually no control of the spin that any given website chooses to put on the article. Apparently this website has given the impression that the video is a "demonstration" of the technology. If I were presenting this video to an audience, I would not say that this was a demo, but rather that it is an illustration of how difficult the sensing problem is. Then I would explain our algorithm in some detail, describing how we overcame the obstacles exemplified in the video.

So when you say that the video has no purpose -- I think that is a result of the website not explaining the video correctly. The primary purpose of the video is to illustrate how hard the sensing problem is. How would you cope with the whiskers slipping and sliding all over the object, if you only had a sensor at the base of the whisker? It's a hard problem!

If the video is interpreted as a "demo," then it is a better demo if you look at the computer-generated image that the whiskers were able to extract. See the figure in the original article. The head on the left is the original sculpture. The image on the right is the sculpture as reconstructed by the whiskers.

You are absolutely correct that it's important to have a good paper when showing any scientific work. The peer-reviewed paper will appear in Nature tomorrow.

Re:

[HorsePunchKid (306850)]

...it is a better demo if you look at the computer-generated image that the whiskers were able to extract. See the figure in the original article.

So you're suggesting I should read the article before drawing conclusions about your research? I can't imagine how that will help, but I guess I could give it a shot just this one time...

Re:

[PresidentEnder (849024)]

While I myself am a christian, to simply state your beliefs as fact and deride others without making logical arguments only drives people away from the very beliefs you want to convince them of.

Re:

[stunt_penguin (906223)]

Well thank fuck someone came out and said it. I'm a Catholic but for anyone to shove it down another's throat (even in flaming) is unacceptable and does the Church more harm than good. Fucking zealous pricks.

Re:Moo

[by Anonymous Coward]

God has already given me this ability. I like caving, and I have grown a moustache the same width as my body to stop me from getting trapped in narrow caves.

Re:

[bogado (25959)]

Is an exercise to the reader to figure out what he was doing with his girlfriend. ;-)

Re:Moo

[prichardson (603676)]

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:

[MSTCrow5429 (642744)]

Most scientists are not atheists.

Putting a dash for the "o" in "God" is a misinterpretation of Scripture.

Re:

[MSTCrow5429 (642744)]

There's only one reason I've seen for the dash before. What reason did you put the dash in there for?

Biomimetics

[Garrett Fox (970174)]

(Deist) Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason argued that Nature is the only reliable scripture!

Actually there's a whole field of "biomimetics" that recognizes that evolution has solved a lot of engineering problems already, giving us clues into things like ideal shapes for sails (birds' wings) and durable macro-scale materials (beehives). The trick to that field is in figuring out what aspects of nature to imitate; for instance, the Wright Brothers studied birds but didn't feel compelled to build a true "orni