Tactile SLAM with a biomimetic whiskered robot

Abstract

Future robots may need to navigate where visual sensors fail. Touch sensors provide an alternative modality, largely unexplored in the context of robotic map building. We present the first results in grid based simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) with biomimetic whisker sensors, and show how multi-whisker features coupled with priors about straight edges in the world can boost its performance. Our results are from a simple, small environment but are intended as a first baseline to measure future algorithms against.