An Optimization Strategy Allowing a Tactile Glove With Minimal Tactile Sensors for Soft Object Identification

Humans can easily perceive the shapes and textures of grasped objects due to high-density mechanoreceptor networks in the hand. However, replicating this capability in wearable devices with limited sensors remains challenging. Here, we designed a tactile glove equipped with easily accessible sensors, enabling accurate identification of soft objects during grasping. We propose an optimization strategy to eliminate redundant sensors and determine the minimal sensor configuration, which was then integrated into the tactile glove. The results indicate that the minimal sensor configuration (n = 7) attached to the hand achieved accurate identification comparable to that obtained using a larger number of sensors (n = 22) distributed across the hand before elimination. Furthermore, we found that various machine learning classifiers achieved recognition accuracies of up to 90% for soft objects when using the tactile glove. Correlation analyses were conducted to characterize individual contribution and mutual cooperativity of regional tactile forces on the hand during grasping, aiding in the interpretation of sensor selection or elimination in the optimization strategy. Adequate validation and analysis demonstrate that our strategy allows an easy-to-apply solution for identifying soft objects via a tactile glove with a minimal number of sensors, offering valuable insights for guiding the design of tactile sensor layouts in artificial limbs and robotic teleoperation systems.