Haptic recognition and mapping of driving road environment by haptograph

Recently, human cooperative robots are desired in an aging society. In particular, recognition performance of environment is the most important. Visual and/or auditory sensors are used to recognize the environment; however, they are not able to recognize contact information. Tactile and/or haptic information is very important for action in unknown environment. The paper gives the haptic sensation to a robot. Furthermore, the obtained haptic information is visualized by haptograph. The haptograph is useful for haptic mapping of environment and trajectory planning for a mobile robot. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.