A Stiffness Controllable Multimodal Whisker Sensor Follicle for Texture Comparison

Mammals like rats, who live in dark burrows, heavily depend on tactile perception obtained through the vibrissal system to move through gaps and to discriminate textures. The organization of a mammalian whisker follicle contains multiple sensory receptors and glands strategically organized to capture tactile sensory stimuli of different frequencies. In this paper, we used a controllable stiffness soft robotic follicle to test the hypothesis that the multimodal sensory receptors together with the controllable stiffness tissues in the whisker follicle form a physical structure to maximize tactile information. In our design, the ring sinus and ringwulst of a biological follicle are represented by a linear actuator connected to a stiffness controllable mechanism in-between two different frequency-dependent data capturing modules. In this paper, we show for the first time the effect of the interplay between the stiffness and the speed of whisking on maximizing a difference metric for texture classification.