Determination of three dimensional curvature of convex object via active touch

In this paper we propose a method of determining the local curvature of a three dimensional convex object using the force and torque information obtained from the active touch of a robot finger. A technique for estimating two dimensional curvature of a convex object are introduced and the way of computing the three dimensional curvature from the two dimensional curvature is presented. Also, we develop an experimental system consisting of a finger and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method experimentally.