Bioinspired, Multifunctional, Active Whisker Sensors for Tactile Sensing of Mobile Robots

Whiskers of some animals, such as rats and cats, can actively sense stimuli from their surrounding environment. Such a capability is attractive for intelligent mobile robots. However, an artificial whisker with similar abilities has not been fully developed so that the robots acquire their surrounding environment information in an active approach such as rats. In this paper, we propose a new bioinspired active whisking tactile sensor (MAWS) capable of sensing the distance, shape, size, and orientation of caves and environmental conditions. Two orthogonally distributed linear Hall sensors are mounted beneath a circular permanent magnet for spatial localization of the whisker. The whisker is then actuated and controlled by an array of nine electromagnetic coils by tuning the excitation current and phase sequence. Conical pendulum and bidirectional sweeping strategies were designed to mimic the simultaneous perception behavior of rats. A reactive obstacle avoidance experiment was also conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed MAWS installed on a mobile robot.