Advancing whisker based navigation through the implementation of Bio-Inspired whisking strategies

Abstract

An active whisking tactile sensor array has been successfully integrated with the RatSLAM algorithm and demonstrated as capable of reducing error in pose estimates of a mobile robot. A new metric for evaluating the performance of RatSLAM is introduced in order to evaluate the impact in performance of whisker-RatSLAM through the adoption of a biomimetic active whisker control scheme and different approaches to tactile sensory pre-processing. Improvements in performance are presented and discussed with respect to how whisker-RatSLAM could form the basis of a computationally efficient and robust localisation and mapping algorithm to adopt for tactile robotic exploration.