Md. Berkemeier et Rs. Fearing, DETERMINING THE AXIS OF A SURFACE OF REVOLUTION USING TACTILE SENSING, IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 15(10), 1993, pp. 1079-1087
Dextrous robot hands need to be able to determine the pose of objects
to reliably grasp and manipulate them. The first few contacts with an
object can be used to provide an initial estimate of this information
if we constrain the object to be of a particular class. This paper con
siders a simple example of exploiting class constraints: finding the a
xis of an unknown surface of revolution. Three tactile curvature measu
rements on a surface of revolution with twice-differentiable sweeping
rule function are shown to be sufficient for determining the axis exce
pt for certain singular configurations. Position and orientation error
uncertainties and experimental results are presented for a cylindrica
l tactile sensor.