Wegiriya, H; Herzig, N; Abad, S-A; Hadi Sadati, SM; Nanayakkara, T; (2020) A Stiffness Controllable Multimodal Whisker Sensor Follicle for Texture Comparison. IEEE Sensors Journal , 20 (5) pp. 2320-2328. 10.1109/jsen.2019.2951755. (In press).

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Abstract

Mammals like rats, who live in dark burrows, heavily depend on tactile perception obtained through the vibrissal system to move through gaps and to discriminate textures. The organization of a mammalian whisker follicle contains multiple sensory receptors and glands strategically organized to capture tactile sensory stimuli of different frequencies. In this paper, we used a controllable stiffness soft robotic follicle to test the hypothesis that the multimodal sensory receptors together with the controllable stiffness tissues in the whisker follicle form a physical structure to maximize tactile information. In our design, the ring sinus and ringwulst of a biological follicle are represented by a linear actuator connected to a stiffness controllable mechanism in-between two different frequency-dependent data capturing modules. In this paper, we show for the first time the effect of the interplay between the stiffness and the speed of whisking on maximizing a difference metric for texture classification.

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