Using robotic exploratory procedures to learn the meaning of haptic adjectives

Vivian Chu, Ian McMahon, Lorenzo Riano, Craig G. McDonald, Qin He, Jorge Martinez Perez-Tejada, Michael Arrigo, Naomi Fitter, John C. Nappo, Trevor Darrell, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
2013 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation  
Delivering on the promise of real-world robotics will require robots that can communicate with humans through natural language by learning new words and concepts through their daily experiences. Our research strives to create a robot that can learn the meaning of haptic adjectives by directly touching objects. By equipping the PR2 humanoid robot with state-ofthe-art biomimetic tactile sensors that measure temperature, pressure, and fingertip deformations, we created a platform uniquely capable
more » ... f feeling the physical properties of everyday objects. The robot used five exploratory procedures to touch 51 objects that were annotated by human participants with 34 binary adjective labels. We present both static and dynamic learning methods to discover the meaning of these adjectives from the labeled objects, achieving average F1 scores of 0.57 and 0.79 on a set of eight previously unfelt items.
doi:10.1109/icra.2013.6631000 dblp:conf/icra/ChuMRMHPAFNDK13 fatcat:l5l3m2z2u5crvcblsdwjgy4zte