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In recent years, machine vision has developed very maturely, but only vision cannot obtain the complete information. With human senses of touch, allows us to accomplish many difficult work which are very important for human. Do machines also need it? What kind of changes can it bring to machine?
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Haptics is a mixture of many senses. When we touch something, we will feel soft, hard, hot, cold, or thickness at the same time, and we will feel what we are touching.
This feeling is mainly through the tactile receptors in the skin that are connected to the nervous system. We may use senses of touch even when we are sleeping, even all the time, Human’s hand has the most tactile receptors compare to other body parts, about 300, which allow us to do many difficult things.
How to give a machine sense of touch? The main purpose is to enable the machine to convert raw data into higher-level information, and to have better performance in grasping and manipulating objects.
Therefore, tactile sensors are used to simulate biological skin receptors, which can receive the signals generated by mechanical stimuli and learn continuously through the machine, and finally the event represented by each signal can be fully identified.
Imagine that if you want to pick up a box of milk, when you didn’t hold it tight enough, it will fall off, but if you hold it too tight, it may squeeze it out; even when you hold the milk, it can pass through the touch of your fingertips to estimate how much milk is in it. Through tactile sense, the rapid changing of pressure and vibration can be sensed, therefore, it can react instantly when an item slips out, machines can also use tactile sense to learn continuously and optimize the entire production process.
Taking a robotic arm as an example, the task of picking up an object is not easy for a machine. If there is no sense of touch in the production process, it can only rely on the set force which is restricted to pick up the object. After installing a tactile sensor, it can automatically detect the state of grasping the object, and then identify the shape and texture of the object taken by itself and calculate how much force is needed and where to apply the force, and even make the object not to slip.
In the past, some emphasis was focus on the visual part of visual, so most of them rely on cameras or sensors to detect the status of objects or products, and use them to control product quality, collect data, product classification or integration, etc., but only with vision cannot understand every important information. Only the action of grasping, machines lacking tactile sense are far behind humans. That’s the reason why so many companies have begun to develop for tactile sense which let machines integrate tactile and vision so that machines can do more and more. Not only in sorting items, but also in providing care and assistance in nursing in the future, or providing better surgical automation in medical care, reducing labor costs, and even implement in rims, buildings, such different field etc.
It is impossible to obtain complete information only by relying on Machine Haptics, which is one of the reasons why machines cannot be compared with humans beings. Haptics could be able to help human accomplish many difficult things, and for machines as well. If visual and tactile are combined with each other, more actions that machines could not perform in the past can be accomplished, and even being more useful not only in the manufacturing industry, but also in other different fields, bringing more and different modes of operation to the world.
Main image photo by adobestock
Reference Site The News Lens / KKnews
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