Acquisition and interpretation of 3-D sensor data from touch

A description is given of the use of touch sensing as part of a larger system the authors are building for 3-D shape recovery and object recognition using touch and vision methods. The authors focus on three exploratory procedures (EPs) they have built to acquire and interpret sparse 3D touch data: grasping by containment, planar surface exploration, and surface contour exploration. Experimental results for each of these procedures are presented. The EPs can be used in a coarse-to-fine sensing strategy that tries to build shape descriptions at a number of levels. An important feature of this system is the multiple representations used in recovering and reasoning about shape