Determining the Axis of a Surface of Revolution Using Tactile Sensing

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 considers a simple example of exploiting class constraints: finding the axis of an unknown surface of revolution. Three tactile curvature measurements on a surface of revolution with twice-differentiable sweeping rule function are shown to be sufficient for determining the axis except for certain singular configurations. Position and orientation error uncertainties and experimental results are presented for a cylindrical tactile sensor.