Array of Accelerometers as a Dynamic Vibro-Tactile Sensing for Assessing the Slipping Noise

Through vibrations people can assess both slippage of the directly grasped object and sliding of an external agent over the surface of the grasped immovable object. In robotic hands, with less advanced tactile sensing, the slippage and sliding events can be hard to distinguish. This paper shows how vibro-tactile sensing array can help to distinguish object/world sliding and sensor/object slippage events based on cross-correlation, which computes similarity in sensor readings of tactile array cells. The proposed vibro-tactile system consists of two accelerometers. Experiments with different surfaces are conducted to test the system and the proposed algorithm.