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Sensing with Artificial Tactile Sensors: An Investigation of Spatio-temporal Inference

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Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6856))

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Abstract

The ease and efficiency with which biological systems deal with several real world problems, that have been persistently challenging to implement in artificial systems, is a key motivation in biomimetic robotics. In interacting with its environment, the first challenge any agent faces is to extract meaningful patterns in the inputs from its sensors. This problem of pattern recognition has been characterized as an inference problem in cortical computation. The work presented here implements the hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) model of cortical computation using inputs from an array of artificial tactile sensors to recognize simple Braille patterns. Although the current work has been implemented using a small array of robot whiskers, the architecture can be extended to larger arrays of sensors of any arbitrary modality.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Adaptive Behaviour Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Asma Motiwala, Charles W. Fox, Nathan F. Lepora & Tony J. Prescott

Authors
  1. Asma Motiwala
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  2. Charles W. Fox
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  3. Nathan F. Lepora
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  4. Tony J. Prescott
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Mappin Street, S1 3JD, Sheffield, UK

    Roderich Groß

  2. Materials and Engineering Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus, Horward Street, S1 1WB, Sheffield, UK

    Lyuba Alboul  & Jacques Penders  & 

  3. Department of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), University of Bristol and the West of England, Bristol Business Park, BS16 1QD, Bistol, UK

    Chris Melhuish

  4. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, SW7 2BT, London, UK

    Mark Witkowski

  5. Department of Psychology, The University of Sheffield, Wstern Bank, S10 2TN, Sheffield, UK

    Tony J. Prescott

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Motiwala, A., Fox, C.W., Lepora, N.F., Prescott, T.J. (2011). Sensing with Artificial Tactile Sensors: An Investigation of Spatio-temporal Inference. In: Groß, R., Alboul, L., Melhuish, C., Witkowski, M., Prescott, T.J., Penders, J. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6856. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23232-9_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23232-9_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23231-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23232-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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