Title
The Spatial Spectrum of Tangential Skin Displacement Can Encode Tactual Texture
Abstract
The tactual scanning of five naturalistic textures was recorded with an apparatus that is capable of measuring the tangential interaction force with a high degree of temporal and spatial resolution. The resulting signal showed that the transformation from the geometry of a surface to the force of traction and, hence, to the skin deformation experienced by a finger is a highly nonlinear process. Participants were asked to identify simulated textures reproduced by stimulating their fingers with rapid, imposed lateral skin displacements as a function of net position. They performed the identification task with a high degree of success, yet not perfectly. The fact that the experimental conditions eliminated many aspects of the interaction, including low-frequency finger deformation, distributed information, as well as normal skin movements, shows that the nervous system is able to rely on only two cues: amplitude and spectral information. The examination of the “spatial spectrograms” of the imposed lateral skin displacement revealed that texture could be represented spatially, despite being sensed through time and that these spectrograms were distinctively organized into what could be called “spatial formants.” This finding led us to speculate that the mechanical properties of the finger enables spatial information to be used for perceptual purposes in humans with no distributed sensing, which is a principle that could be applied to robots.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/TRO.2011.2132830
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Keywords
Field
DocType
distributed sensors,haptic interfaces,robots,surface texture,tactile sensors,distributed information,distributed sensing,lateral skin displacements,low frequency finger deformation,robots,simulated textures,spatial spectrograms,spatial spectrum,tactual texture,tangential skin displacement,Haptic interfaces,surface texture,tactile sensor,virtual reality
Spatial analysis,Computer vision,Nonlinear system,Spectrogram,Traction (orthopedics),Sensor array,Artificial intelligence,Deformation (mechanics),Image resolution,Mathematics,Tactile sensor
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
3
1552-3098
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
35
2.20
10
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michaël Wiertlewski19811.99
José Lozada2594.39
Vincent Hayward31343172.28