Localizing the object contact through matching tactile features with visual map

This paper presents a novel framework for integration of vision and tactile sensing by localizing tactile readings in a visual object map. Intuitively, there are some correspondences, e.g., prominent features, between visual and tactile object identification. To apply it in robotics, we propose to localize tactile readings in visual images by sharing same sets of feature descriptors through two sensing modalities. It is then treated as a probabilistic estimation problem solved in a framework of recursive Bayesian filtering. Feature-based measurement model and Gaussian based motion model are thus built. In our tests, a tactile array sensor is utilized to generate tactile images during interaction with objects and the results have proven the feasibility of our proposed framework.