Touch sensing: An important tool for mobile robot navigation

Guest post for Robohub

I recently contributed a Guest Post for Robohub, a leading non-profit online community for Roboticists.

The article was about touch sensing and how it has only been investigated in the context of grasping and manipulation.

But there is a whole lot more mobile robots can do with the touch sensing modality in the context of navigation as shown by rodents like Rats in Nature.

One of the components of my research interests, is pushing the limits of sensing and delving into unconventional sensors that can serve to complement the Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) sensors.

This article is a brief motivation along those lines and you can read some of my recent publications that show evidence of performance enhancements for robots equipped with biomimetic rat whiskers in simulation and real life.