Exploratory procedures for material properties: the temperature perception

Any time there is a need to physically interact with the external world in an unstructured environment, a robotic system must be able to extract physical, geometrical, and substance properties of that environment. The authors use, and further define, the paradigm of exploratory procedures (EP´s). The EP´s are stereotypical motoric procedures executed by humans when exploring an object. They adapt these for use in the robotics domain. Among the many EP´s, they concentrate on one specific case: the EP that returns the thermal property of an unknown object. They present a new approach for the design and modeling of thermal sensors for robotic applications. A model of one such sensor is developed and its validity is experimentally verified with different objects. Finally, an EP for acquiring the temperature property of an unknown object is described.<>