A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

Abstract— This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot’s tool oint as well as abstract commands like “stop” or “grasp object x with grasp type y”. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient sy...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICMI
• Authors: Andreas J. Schmid, Martin Hoffmann, Heinz Wörn
• Keywords: ICMI 2007, Tactile, Tactile Language, Tactile Language Processing