Haptische Intelligenz Conference Paper 2019

Improving Haptic Adjective Recognition with Unsupervised Feature Learning

Robot

Humans can form an impression of how a new object feels simply by touching its surfaces with the densely innervated skin of the fingertips. Many haptics researchers have recently been working to endow robots with similar levels of haptic intelligence, but these efforts almost always employ hand-crafted features, which are brittle, and concrete tasks, such as object recognition. We applied unsupervised feature learning methods, specifically K-SVD and Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (ST-HMP), to rich multi-modal haptic data from a diverse dataset. We then tested the learned features on 19 more abstract binary classification tasks that center on haptic adjectives such as smooth and squishy. The learned features proved superior to traditional hand-crafted features by a large margin, almost doubling the average F1 score across all adjectives. Additionally, particular exploratory procedures (EPs) and sensor channels were found to support perception of certain haptic adjectives, underlining the need for diverse interactions and multi-modal haptic data.

Author(s): Benjamin A. Richardson and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
Book Title: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Pages: 3804--3810
Year: 2019
Month: May
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Address: Montreal, Canada
DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2019.8793544
State: Published
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Links:

BibTex

@inproceedings{Richardson19-ICRA-Unsupervised,
  title = {Improving Haptic Adjective Recognition with Unsupervised Feature Learning},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  abstract = {Humans can form an impression of how a new object feels simply by touching its surfaces with the densely innervated skin of the fingertips. Many haptics researchers have recently been working to endow robots with similar levels of haptic intelligence, but these efforts almost always employ hand-crafted features, which are brittle, and concrete tasks, such as object recognition. We applied unsupervised feature learning methods, specifically K-SVD and Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (ST-HMP), to rich multi-modal haptic data from a diverse dataset. We then tested the learned features on 19 more abstract binary classification tasks that center on haptic adjectives such as smooth and squishy. The learned features proved superior to traditional hand-crafted features by a large margin, almost doubling the average F1 score across all adjectives. Additionally, particular exploratory procedures (EPs) and sensor channels were found to support perception of certain haptic adjectives, underlining the need for diverse interactions and multi-modal haptic data.},
  pages = {3804--3810},
  address = {Montreal, Canada},
  month = may,
  year = {2019},
  slug = {richardson19-icra-unsupervised},
  author = {Richardson, Benjamin A. and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  month_numeric = {5}
}