Exploring Hardness and Geometry Information through Active Perception

Accurate 3D reconstruction of objects has recently made great breakthroughs, thanks to the development of computer vision. Whereas precise 3D information can merely reflect an object's geometry information, which is limited in many applications. Exploration of more information is needed to fulfill diverse tasks. As an important property of an object, hardness can provide more comprehensive information which can be widely used in various tasks like grasping and manipulation. In this paper, a framework combining active perception and motion planning algorithm is proposed to get both hardness and geometry information of an object which also ensures working efficiency. In this framework, a stylus mounted on a robotic arm explores hardness and geometry information on the surface of the object actively and a depth camera is used to capture raw 3D shape information. A novel motion planning algorithm is proposed to keep the exploration operative and time-saving. Experimental results show that our framework has good performance and can explore global hardness and geometry information efficiently.