Abstract
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.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
The Mathworks - Documentation on the Neural Network Toolbox
Arabzadeh, E., Panzeri, S., Diamond, M.E.: Whisker vibration information carried by rat barrel cortex neurons. Journal of Neuroscience 24(26), 6011–6020 (2004)
Arabzadeh, E., Petersen, R.S., Diamond, M.E.: Encoding of whisker vibration by rat barrel cortex neurons: implications for texture discrimination. Journal of Neuroscience 23(27), 9146–9154 (2003)
Brecht, M., Preilowski, B., Merzenich, M.M.: Functional architecture of the mystacial vibrissae. Behavioral Brain Research 84(1-2), 81–97 (1997)
Carvell, G.E., Simons, D.J.: Biometric analyses of vibrissal tactile discrimination in the rat. Journal of Neuroscience 10(8), 2638–2648 (1990)
Carvell, G.E., Simons, D.J.: Task- and subject-related differences in sensorimotor behavior during active touch. Somatosensory and motor research 12(1), 1–9 (1995)
Diamond, M.: Personal communication (2003)
Fend, M., Bovet, S., Hafner, V.V.: The artificial mouse - a robot with whiskers and vision. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Robotics, Paris (2004) (on CD)
Fend, M., Bovet, S., Yokoi, H., Pfeifer, R.: An active artificial whisker array for texture discrimination. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS (2003)
Fend, M., Yokoi, H., Pfeifer, R.: Optimal morphology of a biologically-inspired whisker array on an obstacle-avoiding robot. In: Banzhaf, W., Christaller, T., Dittrich, P., Kim, J.T., Ziegler, J. (eds.) ECAL 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2801, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Guic-Robles, E., Valdivieso, C., Guajardo, G.: Rats can learn a roughness discrimination using only their vibrissal system. Behavioural Brain Research 31(3), 285–289 (1989)
Hafner, V.V., Fend, M., König, P., Körding, K.P.: Predicting properties of the rat somatosensory system by sparse coding. Neural Information Processing Letters and Reviews 4(1), 11–18 (2004)
Hafner, V.V., Fend, M., Lungarella, M., Pfeifer, R., König, P., Körding, K.P.: Optimal coding for naturally occurring whisker deflections. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), Istanbul (June 2003)
Hipp, J.: Personal communication (2005)
Kim, D., Moeller, R.: A biomimetic whisker for texture discrimination and distance estimation. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), pp. 140–149 (2004)
Lungarella, M., Hafner, V.V., Pfeifer, R., Yokoi, H.: An artificial whisker sensor for robotics. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 2931–2936 (2002)
Metha, S.B., Kleinfeld, D.: Frisking the whiskers: Patterned sensory input in the rat vibrissa system. Neuron 41, 181–184 (2004)
Moore, C.I.: Frequency-dependent processing in the vibrissa sensory system. J. of Neurophysiology 91, 2390–2399 (2004)
Russell, R.A., Wijaya, J.A.: Object location and recognition using whisker sensors. In: Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (2003)
Seth, A., McKinstry, J.L., Edelman, G.M., Krichmar, J.L.: Spatiotemporal processing of whisker input supports texture discrimination by a brain-based device. In: Schaal, S., Ijspeert, A., Billard, A., Vijajamumar, S., Hallam, J., Meyer, J.-A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), pp. 130–139. MIT Press, Cambridge (2004)
Shi, J., Tomasi, C.: Good features to track. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 1994), June 1994, pp. 593–600 (1994)
Wijaya, J.A., Andrew Russell, R.: Object exploration using whisker sensors. In: Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fend, M. (2005). Whisker-Based Texture Discrimination on a Mobile Robot. In: Capcarrère, M.S., Freitas, A.A., Bentley, P.J., Johnson, C.G., Timmis, J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_31
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28848-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31816-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)