Experiments with Proprioception in a Self-Organizing System for Haptic Perception

We have experimented with proprioception in a bio-inspired self-organizing haptic system. To this end a 12 d.o.f. anthropomorphic robot hand with proprioceptive sensors was developed. The system uses a self-organizing map for the mapping of the explored objects. In our experiments the system was trained and tested with 10 different objects of different sizes from two different shape categories. To estimate the generalization ability the system was also tested with 6 new objects. The system showed good performance with the objects from both the training set as well as in the generalization experiment. In both cases the system was able to discriminate the shape, the size and to some extent the individual objects.