Visibility-Inspired Models of Touch Sensors for Navigation
This work provides foundational models for touch sensor design in mobile robots, though it appears incremental as it adapts visibility concepts from vision to touch sensing.
The paper introduces mathematical models for touch sensors in mobile robots based on visibility concepts, aiming to provide idealized characterizations of task-relevant information for navigation, localization, and mapping. The models allow direct comparisons with traditional depth sensors and highlight cases where touch sensing may be interchangeable or offer unique advantages.
This paper introduces mathematical models of \sensors\ for mobile robots based on visibility. Serving a purpose similar to the pinhole camera model for computer vision, the introduced models are expected to provide a useful, idealized characterization of task-relevant information that can be inferred from their outputs or observations. Possible tasks include navigation, localization and mapping when a mobile robot is deployed in an unknown environment. These models allow direct comparisons to be made between traditional depth sensors, highlighting cases in which touch sensing may be interchangeable with time of flight or vision sensors, and characterizing unique advantages provided by touch sensing. The models include contact detection, compression, load bearing, and deflection. The results could serve as a basic building block for innovative touch sensor designs for mobile robot sensor fusion systems.