Visibility-Inspired Models of Touch Sensors for Navigation

TL;DR

This paper develops visibility-inspired mathematical models of touch sensors for mobile robots, enabling better understanding and comparison with traditional sensors for tasks like navigation and mapping.

Contribution

It introduces novel mathematical models of touch sensors based on visibility principles, facilitating comparison with depth and vision sensors for robotic navigation.

Findings

Models include contact detection, compression, load bearing, and deflection.

Touch sensing can be interchangeable with vision sensors in certain cases.

Provides a foundation for designing new touch sensors for robot sensor fusion.

Abstract

This paper introduces mathematical models of \sensors\ for mobile robots based on visibility. Serving a purpose similar to the pinhole camera model for computer vision, the introduced models are expected to provide a useful, idealized characterization of task-relevant information that can be inferred from their outputs or observations. Possible tasks include navigation, localization and mapping when a mobile robot is deployed in an unknown environment. These models allow direct comparisons to be made between traditional depth sensors, highlighting cases in which touch sensing may be interchangeable with time of flight or vision sensors, and characterizing unique advantages provided by touch sensing. The models include contact detection, compression, load bearing, and deflection. The results could serve as a basic building block for innovative touch sensor designs for mobile robot sensor fusion systems.