A biomimetic whisker for texture discrimination and distance estimation

Rodents use their whiskers (vibrissae) for tactile perception, specifically for texture discrimination and shape recognition. In this paper, we present an artificial whisker system biologically inspired by rodent whiskers. We first focus on the question, how the natural frequencies of the whisker bar affect the processing of tactile signals. For texture discrimination it is shown that separating the range of the tactile signals from the natural frequencies improves the classification quality. In contrast, natural frequencies prove to be a source of information for distance estimation. It is also demonstrated that the time course of deflection angles or deflection velocities can determine the distance of objects.