Active perception: Building objects' models using tactile exploration

In this paper we present an efficient active learning strategy applied to the problem of tactile exploration of an object’s surface. The method uses Gaussian process (GPs) classification to efficiently sample the surface of the object in order to reconstruct its shape. The proposed method iteratively samples the surface of the object, while, simultaneously constructing a probabilistic model of the object’s surface. The probabilities in the model are used to guide the exploration. At each iteration, the estimate of the object’s shape is used to slice the object in equally spaced intervals along the height of the object. The sampled locations are then labelled according to the interval in which their height falls. In its simple form, the data are labelled as belonging to the object and not belonging to the object: object and no-object, respectively. A GP classifier is trained to learn the object/no-object decision boundary. The next location to be sampled is selected at the classification boundary, in this way, the exploration is biased towards more informative areas. Complex features of the object’s surface is captured by increasing the number of intervals as the number of sampled locations is increased. We validated our approach on six objects of different shapes using the iCub humanoid robot. Our experiments show that the method outperforms random selection and previous work based on GP regression by sampling more points on and near-the-boundary of the object.