Vision based active antenna

This paper proposes the vision based active antenna (VBAA) that can detect the contact force, the stiffness of the environment, and the contact location between an insensitive elastic antenna and an environment, through the observation of the antenna´s shape by a camera. We show that both the contact location and the contact force can be estimated by measuring two arbitrary points on the antenna after a pushing motion; even though the exact contact point is hidden by occlusion. By considering the geometrical relationship between. The virtual (without environment) and the real (with environment) displacements of the contact point, the stiffness of the environment can also be estimated, which our conventional active antenna can not do. We present the basic working principle of the VBAA and give experimental verification