Active tactile perception of 3D surface geometric profiles

A tactile probe is presented which was designed specifically to respond to a 3D geometric profile stimulus (measurand). In order to improve the tactile probe´s compliance to the explored object surface, the authors have used an instrumented passively compliant wrist to attach the probe to the manipulator. It was found that special attention has to be paid in choosing the dimensions of the tactile sensing array. A large array would provide more parallel data per pose, which means that fewer poses will be required to explore a large object surface. On the negative side, a large array is a large rigid plane which will touch relatively fewer and higher peaks (and consequently will miss relatively minor surface details) than a smaller array