Exploratory procedures for material properties: the temperature perception

Abstract

Any time there is a need to physically interact with the external world in an unstructured environment, a robotic system must be able to extract physical, geometrical, and substance properties of that environment. The authors use, and further define, the paradigm of exploratory procedures (EP's). The EP's are stereotypical motoric procedures executed by humans when exploring an object. They adapt these for use in the robotics domain. Among the many EP's, they concentrate on one specific case: the EP that returns the thermal property of an unknown object. They present a new approach for the design and modeling of thermal sensors for robotic applications. A model of one such sensor is developed and its validity is experimentally verified with different objects. Finally, an EP for acquiring the temperature property of an unknown object is described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>