Navigation and 3D Surface Reconstruction from Passive Whisker Sensing

Understand

Whiskers provide a way to sense surfaces in the immediate environment without disturbing it.

• In this paper we present a method for using highly flexible, curved, passive whiskers mounted along a robot arm to gather sensory data as they brush past objects during normal robot motion.
• The information is useful both for guiding the robot in cluttered spaces and for reconstructing the exposed faces of objects.
• Surface reconstruction depends on accurate localization of contact points along each whisker.