2020/12/03 by Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, Henry Clever, Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · Medicine · #Advanced Chemical Sensor Technologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Infrared Thermography in Medicine #Robotics (cs.RO) #Thermography and Photoacoustic Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.02176
openalex publication_date 2020/12/03 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Humans and robots can recognize materials with distinct thermal effusivities\nby making physical contact and observing temperatures during heat transfer.\nThis works well with room temperature materials and humans and robots at human\nbody temperatures. Past research has shown that cooling or heating a material\ncan result in temperatures that are similar to contact with another material.\nTo thoroughly investigate this perceptual ambiguity, we designed a\npsychophysical experiment in which a participant discriminates between two\nmaterials given ambiguous initial conditions. We conducted a study with 32\nhuman participants and a robot. Humans and the robot confused the materials. We\nalso found that robots can overcome this ambiguity using two temperature\nsensors with different temperatures prior to contact. We support this\nconclusion based on a mathematical proof using a heat transfer model and\nempirical results in which a robot achieved 100% accuracy compared to 5% human\naccuracy. Our results also indicate that robots can use subtle cues to\ndistinguish thermally ambiguous materials with a single temperature sensor.\nOverall, our work provides insights into challenging conditions for material\nrecognition via heat transfer, and suggests methods by which robots can\novercome these challenges to outperform humans.\n