Material Classification Using Active Temperature Controllable Robotic Gripper

TL;DR

This paper introduces a material classification system using an active temperature controllable robotic gripper that induces heat flow to recognize object materials regardless of ambient temperature, leveraging thermal sensing and LSTM analysis.

Contribution

The novel contribution is the development of a robotic gripper with active temperature control for real-time material recognition independent of environmental conditions.

Findings

Successful integration of temperature control with a robotic arm.

Effective material classification using LSTM on temperature data.

Recognition accuracy demonstrated across different ambient temperatures.

Abstract

Recognition techniques allow robots to make proper planning and control strategies to manipulate various objects. Object recognition is more reliable when made by combining several percepts, e.g., vision and haptics. One of the distinguishing features of each object's material is its heat properties, and classification can exploit heat transfer, similarly to human thermal sensation. Thermal-based recognition has the advantage of obtaining contact surface information in realtime by simply capturing temperature change using a tiny and cheap sensor. However, heat transfer between a robot surface and a contact object is strongly affected by the initial temperature and environmental conditions. A given object's material cannot be recognized when its temperature is the same as the robotic grippertip. We present a material classification system using active temperature controllable robotic gripper to induce heat flow. Subsequently, our system can recognize materials independently from their ambient temperature. The robotic gripper surface can be regulated to any temperature that differentiates it from the touched object's surface. We conducted some experiments by integrating the temperature control system with the Academic SCARA Robot, classifying them based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) using temperature data obtained from grasping target objects.