Tactile sensing has recently been used in robotics for object identification, grasping, and material recognition. Most material recognition approaches use vibration information from a tactile exploration, typically above one second long, to identify the material. This work proposes a tactile multi-modal (vibration and thermal) material identification approach based on recursive Bayesian estimation. Through the frequency response of the vibration induced by the material and thermal features, like an estimate of the thermal power loss of the finger, we show that it is possible to identify materials in less than half a second. Moreover, a comparison between the use of vibration only and multi-modal identification shows that both recognition time and classification errors are reduced by adding thermal information.

翻译：触觉感知近年来在机器人领域中被用于物体识别、抓取及材料辨识。大多数材料识别方法使用触觉探索中的振动信息（通常持续一秒以上）来辨识材料。本文提出一种基于递归贝叶斯估计的触觉多模态（振动与热感知）材料识别方法。通过材料诱发振动的频率响应以及热特征（如手指热功率损耗的估计值），我们证明可以在半秒内实现材料识别。此外，对比仅使用振动信息的多模态识别方法，加入热信息后，识别时间和分类误差均有所降低。