The duality of haptic and visual search for object recognition

The similarity between the manner in which objects may be explored using visual and haptic (touch) sensing is investigated. An undersea telerobotic manipulator system application is considered. The experimental evidence provides support for the hypothesis that there is strong correlation between haptic sensing and the foveal component of visual sensing at least as far as exploratory search is concerned. Experiments using these sensory modalities indicated the equivalence of information provided by each. This is in contrast to traditional scanpath search, which is also investigated for the object set under study