Stereometric pattern recognition by artificial touch

An artificial touch perception system has been created in order to study a method of processing information obtainable through tactile exploration of three-dimensional forms. The results can be useful for several purposes.The first part of the work concerns the project of the tactile explorator. For this purpose we used a kind of artificial limb like a finger with a certain number of touch sensitive transducers distributed along the surface of the finger tip. The information received by touching the object with the finger, is successively utilized as the input of the control servosystem which moves the finger point-by-point along the object surface in order to proceed with the exploration. It must be noticed that, from a philosophical point-of-view, the parallel approach with more fingers touching simultaneously the object in several points, is equal to sequential touching of these points by one moving finger.The second part describes the use of the propositional calculus in logical classification of the objects, as a method of three-dimensional pattern recognition.Elaboration of the input data obtained by tactile exploration, and computation of characteristic geometrical features of three-dimensional forms, has been performed on computer.