An active artificial whisker array for texture discrimination

Whiskers are powerful sensors for robots that are not only useful for basic tasks such as obstacle avoidance, but also have the potential for gathering rich information about objects. We have developed an active multi-whisker array modeled on the rat whisker system which can be amounted on a mobile robot. We show that with this whisker array we can discriminate different textures based on the frequencies elicited by the whiskers. We exploit the phase-locked structure of our data using sensory-motor integration. Two factors enable better discrimination of the textures: firstly, considering several touch events from one whisker; and secondly, combining the information from more than one whisker.