Towards the creation of tactile maps for robots and their use in robot contact motion control

The recent availability of large-scale tactile systems for robots implies the design and development of tactile representation frameworks able to inform tactile-based robot control strategies. As a matter of fact, this is a non-trivial problem in knowledge representation. Starting from the previous work, we introduce the notion of tactile maps for robots, and we propose an architecture that addresses all the various phases which allow us to implement tactile-based representation and robot control. The proposed architecture is validated using simulations, which are aimed at assessing the robustness and the performance of the chosen control strategy with respect to the accuracy of the robot skin representation as well as to the force feedback needed to implement tactile-based contact tasks.