Whisker Sensor for Robot Environments Perception: A Review

Nocturnal mammals such as rats heavily depend on whisker-based tactile perception to find their way through burrows and to identify objects. There is diversity in the whiskers in terms of the physical structure and nervous innervation. The robotics community has developed many different whisker sensors inspired by this biological basis. They take diverse mechanical, electronic, and computational approaches to use whiskers to identify the geometry, mechanical properties, and texture of objects. Some works address specific object features and some others address multiple features. Therefore, it is vital to have a comprehensive discussion of the literature and to understand the merits of both bio-inspired and pure-engineered approaches to whisker-based tactile perception. In this article, we report and discuss the progress in the following areas: the body of mammalian whisker follicle, unimodal whiskered sensors, multimodal whiskered sensors with variable stiffness that can capture tactile sensory stimuli of different frequencies, obstacles detection, shape detection, texture classification, and robot navigation using whiskers.