TACTILE SENSING SYSTEM FOR OBJECT IDENTIFICATION USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

BY:
SK. KHADARBASHA

B. RAVI TEJA ROLL NO: Y3EC868 4/4 B.TECH(ECE)

RVR&JC ENGINEERING COLLEGE GUNTUR-522019
EMAIL:TEJA_868@YAHOO.COM

ROLLNO: Y3EC823 4/4 B.TECH(ECE)

RVR&JC ENGINEERING COLLEGE GUNTUR 522019
EMAIL:SKKB5@YAHOO.COM

Ph: 9885793277

ph: 9985499191

ABSTRACT Object Identification plays an important role in various applications ranging

from robotics to computer vision. Artificial neural network (ANN) is being used for in various pattern recognition applications due to the advantages of ability as well as adaptability to learn. This paper presents identification of object independent to size,

position and orientation using the concept of ANN and moments. The image of the object is taken with the help of the tactile sensing system. This paper describes the
complete hardware and software of the system for the object identification with the

help of ANN. Keywords: Tactile sensing, Object orientation, force sensing sites.

Introduction
Of the many sensing operations performed by the human beings , the one that is probably the most likely to be taken for granted is that of touch. Touch is not only complementary to vision , but it offers many powerful sensing capabilities. Tactile
sensing is another name of touch sensing, which deals with the acquisition of

information about the object simply by touching that object .Touch sensing gives the information about the object like shape , hardness , surface details and height of the
object etc. Tactile sensing is required when an intelligent robot wants to perform

delicate assembly operations. During this assembly operation an industrial robot must
be capable of recognizing parts, determining their position, orientation and sensing any

problem encountered during the assembly from the interface of the parts.
Keeping all these things in mind a tactile sensing system is developed which

uses image processing techniques for preprocessing and analysis along with ANNs for object identification. Classification of the object independent of translation, scale,
rotation is a difficult task. The concept of artificial neural network is used in this system

for the proper identification of the object irrespective to their size, position and the orientation.

Configuration of tactile sensing system

This system uses conductive elastomer as a sensor, which has property that its
conductivity changes as the function of the pressure. Fig 1 shows the configuration of

the system. The conductive elastomer is mounted on 8*8 force sensing sites for the measurement of pressure distribution on the object. These force sensing sites are
connected through PC add on data acquisition card. Stepper motor is used to apply specific amount of pressure for proper identification of the objects. Hardware for scanning the matrix and related signal conditioning is designed along with the stepper

motor interface circuitry. Once the image of the object is acquired through the tactile

sensing system then it is further processed using image processing concepts for the
proper identification and inferring other properties of the objects. Tactile data for the

object identification is acquired using row-scanning technique. After the removal of noise from this tactile data it passes to the different modules of the system for furtherprocessing.
DATA
ACQUISITOIN

CARD
TACTILE IMAGER MOUNTED ON COMPUTER FOR TACTILE DATA INPUT OUTPUT

STEPPER MOTOR

DATA PROCEESSING

CARD

Figure1. Configuration of the system

Tactile data processing

A menu driven user interactive software has been developed in C language on DOS platform for the system. Main modules of this software package are preprocessing, data acquisition, matrix representation graphical representation, edge detection and moments calculations for generating a feature vector. Tactile image
acquisition involves conversion of the pressure image into an array of numbers that can

be manipulated by the computer. In this system tactile sensor is used to obtain the pressure data of the object and this data is further acquired with the help of data acquisition and data input output card, which are interfaced with the computer. The preprocessing module involves in the removal of the noise, which is essential for
acquiring the image of the object under consideration. The image is analyzed by a set of

numerical features to remove redundancy from data and reduce its dimensions. Invariant moments are calculated in this module which is required by the next module
to the artificial neural for the identification of the object independent to scale, rotation

and position.

Main system program

The software for the system is menu driven, user interactive. Main module of a
system includes the description of the system and gives many options to the user for processing the tactile data in different forms like automatic or manual processing of the data. Feature extraction module is used for the calculation of the moments from the acquired tactile data. The application of moments provides a method of describing the object in terms of its area, position and the orientation. These invariant moment are

used by the ANN as the input neurodes which is the important data for the classification
and identification of the object. Flow chart for taking the image identification is shown

in Fig.3.

Artificial Neural Network

Artificial neural network ,which is inspired from the studies of biological

nervous system ,has been used

for various applications like supervised classifier.

Object identification is decision making process that requires the neural network to

identify the class and category, which best represent the input pattern.

TACTILE

IMAGE
ACQUISITION

PRE PROCESSING

OBJECT
IDENTIFICAITON

BY ANN

Figure 2. Tactile Data processing To overcome the difficulty of identifying the object using the moment alone use of
artificial neural networks for the same purpose was investigated. The back propagation

algorithm was implemented in the software to generate three-layered network. The feature vector was given as the input layer to the network. The number of input neurodes was equal to the number of feature vectors (invariant moments). The number of output neurodes was kept equal to the number of the objects to be identified. Here it
was considered only five objects like square, triangular, rectangular, bar, circle. Several

experiments were carried out and it was observed that for input neurodes equal to the seven, hidden neurodes required were three .Increase in hidden neurodes increase the

complexity of the network and also increases the computational time of the system .Also less number of hidden neurodes takes longer time to be trained .Hence the optimum value of hidden value to be decided for the use of artificial neural network .

Experimentation
To start with tactile sensing system was designed and tested.Stepper motor is used for exerting specific amount of pressure on the object
,which is required for the handling of delicate START

objects, getting proper image of the object and calculating the height of object .First of all stepper motor is arranged in such a way that its angular
a way that it travels linear

Is Syste m Y Acquire the Image Pre processing of the image

motion is converted into the linear motion and it

was designed in such

No Card Detected
STOP

distance of

0.03 mm per step. This

part of

calibration is also used for calculating the height of the object .To begin with ,motion
and the linear of stepper

of the stepper User Option for Image Identification

STOP

motor was calibrated in terms of pressure applied displacement . Pressure calibration with the help of

motor is done

between two parallel plates of

the capacitor .First graph

was

plotted

Figure 3. Flowchart of image identification pressure verses the change in the value of the capacitance .Response of the same is shown in Graph1. Then the same capacitive
tactel was used to find the number of steps verses change in capacitance response

as

shown in Graph 2.Then pressure verses

was repeated

with
for the

the help of steps

many

of the two graphs the third

graph

was

plotted

number

of the stepper ,Which is given in Graph

capacitive tactels. And the pressure

3.This process

calibration was completed in this way. Finally It was found that stepper motor could exert pressure 19N/M2 per step. After the calibration of the stepper motor the sensor (elastometer) was calibrated in terms of the pressure and time response. Thus the system with stepper motor used for applying specific amount of pressure along with the data acquisition and data input Output card could be used for acquiring a tactile data. Programs were developed to scan and digitize individual tactels and store the tactile information in the form of a two dimensional array. The response of change in the ADC out put voltage with the number of steps of the stepper motor is shown in Graph 4.The purposes software provides the user options of processing the data for different

through the main menu.

Experiments on object identification with the help of ANN

After the calibration performed was trained on the of the sensor and the system the experiments were network objects like square, triangular circular, rectangular. The

by generating the learn data file having moments with change in the

position ,size and orientation of the objects. The trained network was linked with the moments module and derived moments were input to the neural network. Target pattern was set at less than 0.5 for output not belonging to the class and greater than 0.5 for correct class.

GRAPH 1

GRAPH 2

GRAPH 3 (A) Change in position

GRAPH 4

For this experiment the position of the object is varied over the array of the sensor. And the moments were calculated for the same object. Then the network was trained with the help of three sets of data by varying its position . Then is was observed that network was successful to identify the object which was not included in the training set of the object. (B) Change in size Size of square was varied as 2x2,4X4 ,6X6.Invariant moments calculated from these objects and network was trained then network was given set of the data which
was not included in the training and it was observed that the network was successful

to give proper identification of the object. (C) Change in orientation The network was trained with set of data by changing its orientation and this network was tested for the data, which was not included in the training set.Finally it was observed that network can identify the objects independent of the size ,orientation and position of the object . These experiment s have been carried out for
the identification of the square, triangular, circular , rectangular ,bar type of the object

once the training Of the artificial neural network has been completed with the help of moment data file.
In this way different types of objects were tested and it was concluded that

system is intelligent

enough to give best results

for the identification

of different

types of objects and describing the object further analysis of the object the tactile
modules of the system For

under consideration

in many ways. For

data automatically passed to the different

the SURFER software

3-D representation of the object

package is included in the system which gives the best 3-D representation of the object.

Conclusion
This system is well suited for the classification of the object with the help of ANN and moments. Classification and identification of the object is independent to size, position capability and orientation of the object under distribution ,on consideration .This system has of describing the object under test in different forms like identification , the object,3-D representation,

height ,edge, contact area, pressure

orientation, position etc of the object. The system has well support of software for processing the tactile data in different forms and taking any decision after the
identification of the object. Finally it is observed that this system is intelligent enough

for the identification of different types of the object like square, rectangle ,circle, bar, triangle independent to their position ,orientation and scale and giving its many physical properties .This system has various applications in robotics, medical and teleoperations and in computer vision.

References:
[1].Prasant Kumar Patra,Neural network for invariant image Classification , Journal of the IETE,vol 42,nos4-5,pp 282-290,July-October 1994. [2].R.P.L. Rectier, Tactile Imaging,Security and Actuators, A(1992) pp 83-89. [3].G.J. Awcock & R. Thomas , Applied image processing , McGraw Hill ,pp162-166 [4]. Elepart &Bobbins (Eds), Neural Network PC Tools A practical guide