Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 10, numbers 3 and 4, 2017 // View article

Object Sensing and Shape Detection Using Vibrissa Hair-like Sensors with Intrinsic Curvature

Authors:
Carsten Behn
Christoph Will
Anton Sauter
Tobias Preiß
Joachim Steigenberger

Keywords: Vibrissa; intrinsic curvature; sensing; object scanning; contour reconstruction.

Abstract:
Numerous mammals possess in addition to normal body hairs tactile hairs, also known as vibrissae or whiskers, to explore their environment. Biological observations have shown that rodents use their tactile hairs in the snout region (mystacial vibrissae) to estimate obstacle contact and obstacle shape within a few contacts of the tactile hair. Despite different morphology of animal vibrissae (e.g., cylindrically or conically shaped, pre-curved, multi-layer structure), these biological tactile hairs are modeled in a mechanical way to develop and analyze models concerning their bending behavior with a glance to get hints for a technical implementation as a technical sensor. We focus on an analytical description, numerical simulations and experimental verifications of an object scanning process to to achieve a better understanding of this sense. We investigate the bending behavior of cylindrically shaped rods with an intrinsic curvature, which are one-sided clamped and interact with a rigid obstacle in the plane. Hence, the sensing element vibrissa is under the load of an external contact force during object scanning and is frequently modeled as an Euler-Bernoulli bending rod allowing for large deflections. Most of the literature is limited to the research on cylindrical & straight, or tapered & straight rods. The (natural) intrinsic curved shape is rarely analyzed. Hence, the aim is to determine the obstacle’s contour by one quasi-static sweep along the obstacle and to figure out the dependence on the intrinsic curvature of the rod. The consideration of an intrinsic curvature makes the analytical treatment a bit harder and results in numerical solutions of the process. Nevertheless, at first, we focus on a constant intrinsic curvature and, then, present simulations and experiments using a variable one.

Pages: 179 to 188

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679