Chapter 41 — Active Manipulation for Perception

Tactile exploration and modeling using shape primitives

This video shows a robot performing tactile exploration and modeling of a lab-constructed scene that was designed to be similar to those found in interventions for underwater oil spills (leaking pipe). Representing the scene with geometric primitives enables the surface to be described using only sparse tactile data from joint encoders. The robot's movements are chosen to maximize the expected increase in knowledge about the scene.
Francesco Mazzini
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Courtesy of Francesco Mazzini; the video is from his PhD thesis at MIT.
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