Tactile-Data Classification of Contact Materials Using Computational Intelligence

The two major components of a robotic tactile-sensing system are the tactile-sensing hardware at the lower level and the computational/software tools at the higher level. Focusing on the latter, this research assesses the suitability of computational-intelligence (CI) tools for tactile-data processing. In this context, this paper addresses the classification of sensed object material from the recorded raw tactile data. For this purpose, three CI paradigms, namely, the support-vector machine (SVM), regularized least square (RLS), and regularized extreme learning machine (RELM), have been employed, and their performance is compared for the said task. The comparative analysis shows that SVM provides the best tradeoff between classification accuracy and computational complexity of the classification algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the CI tools are effective in dealing with the challenging problem of material classification.