Haptic Intelligence Ph.D. Thesis 2024

Capturing and Recognizing Multimodal Surface Interactions as Embedded High-Dimensional Distributions

Exploring a surface with a handheld tool generates complex contact signals that uniquely encode the surface's properties—a needle hidden in a haystack of data. Humans naturally integrate visual, auditory, and haptic sensory data during these interactions to accurately assess and recognize surfaces. However, enabling artificial systems to perceive and recognize surfaces with human-like proficiency remains a significant challenge. The complexity and dimensionality of multi-modal sensor data, particularly in the intricate and dynamic modality of touch, hinders effective sensing and processing. Successfully overcoming these challenges will open up new possibilities in applications such as quality control, material documentation, and robotics. This dissertation addresses these issues at the levels of both the sensing hardware and the processing algorithms by introducing an automated similarity framework for multimodal surface recognition, developing a haptic-auditory test bed for acquiring high-quality surface data, and exploring optimal sensing configurations to improve recognition performance and robustness.

Author(s): Behnam Khojasteh
Year: 2024
Month: December
Bibtex Type: Ph.D. Thesis (phdthesis)
Address: Stuttgart, Germany
Degree Type: PhD
Note: Faculty of Engineering Design, Production Engineering and Automotive Engineering
School: University of Stuttgart
State: Published

BibTex

@phdthesis{Khojasteh24-PHD-Multimodal,
  title = {Capturing and Recognizing Multimodal Surface Interactions as Embedded High-Dimensional Distributions},
  abstract = {Exploring a surface with a handheld tool generates complex contact signals that uniquely encode the surface's properties—a needle hidden in a haystack of data. Humans naturally integrate visual, auditory, and haptic sensory data during these interactions to accurately assess and recognize surfaces. However, enabling artificial systems to perceive and recognize surfaces with human-like proficiency remains a significant challenge. The complexity and dimensionality of multi-modal sensor data, particularly in the intricate and dynamic modality of touch, hinders effective sensing and processing. Successfully overcoming these challenges will open up new possibilities in applications such as quality control, material documentation, and robotics. This dissertation addresses these issues at the levels of both the sensing hardware and the processing algorithms by introducing an automated similarity framework for multimodal surface recognition, developing a haptic-auditory test bed for acquiring high-quality surface data, and exploring optimal sensing configurations to improve recognition performance and robustness.},
  degree_type = {PhD},
  school = {University of Stuttgart},
  address = {Stuttgart, Germany},
  month = dec,
  year = {2024},
  note = {Faculty of Engineering Design, Production Engineering and Automotive Engineering},
  slug = {khojasteh24-phd-multimodal},
  author = {Khojasteh, Behnam},
  month_numeric = {12}
}