Recognition of contact surfaces using optical tactile and F/T sensors integrated by fuzzy fusion algorithm

This paper proposes a surface recognition algorithm which determines the types of contact surfaces by fusing the information collected by the multisensor system, consisting of the optical tactile and force/torque sensors. Since the image shape measured by the optical tactile sensor system, which is used for determining the surface type, varies depending on the forces provided at the measuring moment, the force information measured by the F/T sensor takes an important role. In this paper an image contour is represented by the long and short axes and they are fuzzified individually by the membership function formulated by observing the variation of the lengths of the long and short axes depending on the provided force. The fuzzified values of the long and short axes are fused using the average Minkowski distance. Compared to the case where only the contour information is used, the proposed algorithm has shown about 14% of enhancement in the recognition ratio. Especially, when imposing the optimal force determined by the experiments, the recognition ratio has been measured over 91%.