Acquisition and Application of a Tactile Database

We present a database of 2D pressure profile time series as a testbed for tactile object and surface recognition. The tactile database captures the surfaces of household and toy objects by moving a 2D pressure sensor mounted to an industrial robot arm around the objects using real-time trajectory calculation. Thus, it represents different "views" of the objects in a similar way as the well known Columbia Object Image Library (COIL) captures different views of an object by a camera. As a first application, objects in the database are classified using a neural network architecture.