Extracting rheological properties of deformable objects with Haptic vision

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extracting rheological properties of deformable objects based on Haptic vision, which was proposed for vision-based automatic construction of virtual environment simulators. The method consists of two parts: 1) the "touch and see" part to cause deformation behavior by exerting known contact force on the object using a robot hand, and then observe how the deformed shape return to the original after contact force is removed, using a range sensor and a force-feedback sensor mounted on the robot hand, 2) the analysis and parameter extraction part from the acquired range images and force-feedback data. Experimental results using springs and wheat dough demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach to viscoelastic parameter extraction of rheological objects.