The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to provide a new standard of quantifying touch for industries currently relying on qualitative data from expert sensory panels (the tactile equivalent of professional wine tasters). Advancing the understanding of the role and function of tactile sensing in perception and manipulation is also essential if robots are to behave like humans. Studies have demonstrated that humans who cannot feel due to permanent disease or temporary anesthesia perform poorly in fine manipulation tasks (similar to even the best robotic systems without touch). The research proposed in this project is the next step to bring tactile sensing and sensory-motor intelligence to the next generation of robotics. The successful demonstration of a tactile sensor with perceptual similarity to the human fingertip would mark substantial progress in the field of telemanipulation, bringing the world one step closer to remote haptic perception. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project seeks to develop the world's first standard of human tactile perception. It has been proposed that tactile recognition presents a more difficult problem than vision and hearing, requiring not only intelligent sensory processing, but also intelligent algorithms to select and control movements, which have a tremendous influence on what is sensed. Artificial sensors that mimic the mechanical properties and sensitivity of the human fingertip have not existed until recently. The research proposed herein will test hypotheses that a biologically inspired robotic system can measure properties that correspond to subjective percepts, descriptors and associations that humans use to characterize objects by touch.
