Factors Involved in Tactile Texture Perception through Probes

An understanding of texture perception by robotic systems can be developed by examining human texture perception through a probe. Like texture perception through direct touch with the finger, texture perception by indirect means of a probe is multi-dimensional, comprising rough, hard, and sticky texture continua. In this study, we describe the individual subject variability in probe-mediated texture perception, and compare similarities and differences of texture perception between direct touch and indirect touch. The results show variability among subjects, as individual subjects may choose to rely on different degrees of three texture dimensions and do so at different scanning velocities. Despite this variability between scanning conditions within each subject, the subjects make consistently reliable discriminations of textures and subjective magnitude estimates along texture continua when indirectly exploring texture surfaces with a probe. These data contribute information that is valuable to the design of robotic sensory systems, and to the understanding of sensory feedback, which is essential in teleoperations.