Tactile tomographic fluid-flow imaging with a robotic whisker array

Cagdas Tuna, Douglas L. Jones, Farzad Kamalabadi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Current sensory array systems do not fully exploit tactile sensing strategies widely used by vibrissal sensing animals to explore their surroundings. We develop a new tactile fluid-flow imaging technique, which relates rat's whisker movements to tomographic imaging to extract fluid-flow characteristics with a robotic whisker array. At high Reynolds numbers, the drag force on a whisker segment is proportional to the relative velocity squared, and acts as a distributed load along the whisker length. Therefore, we propose that it is possible to map out the 2-D cross-sectional mean fluid-flow velocity field with a robotic whisker array by measuring the moment sensed at each whisker base from different directions for tomographic reconstruction. The associated inverse problem for the tomographic image formation is formulated as a MAP estimation problem and solved computationally. The experimental results demonstrate that this new approach offers a fundamentally novel sensor technology for flow-field measurements.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2014
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6815-6819
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781479928927
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2014 - Florence, Italy
Duration: May 4 2014May 9 2014

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Other

Other2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2014
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period5/4/145/9/14

Keywords

  • Robotic whiskers
  • flow imaging
  • inverse problem
  • tactile sensing
  • tomography

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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