Probing the curvature of a convex object via discrete active touch

Abstract

In this paper we propose a method of probing the local curvature of a three-dimensional (3D) convex object using the force and torque information which is obtained from the discrete active touch with a robot linger. A scheme for estimating two-dimensional (2D) curvature of a convex object is introduced and the way of extracting 3D curvatures from 2D curvatures is presented. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical simulations have been per-formed and experiments have also been carried out with an experimental system consisting of a finger.