High-Speed Tactile Braille Reading
Vision-based tactile sensing system for robotic Braille reading.
Overview
Designed and built a high-speed vision-based tactile sensing system for robotic Braille reading, inspired by human sliding touch. The system achieves fast and accurate character recognition by leveraging continuous motion rather than static probing.
High-speed tactile braille reading via biomimetic sliding interactions Potdar, P., Hardman, D., Almanzor, E., Iida, F.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024
Key Contributions
- Developed a biomimetic sliding interaction pipeline for tactile perception
- Built a real-time inference system for sequential Braille character recognition:
- Deblurring Autoencoder to remove motion blur from sliding touch images
- YOLOv8 Object Detection to localise and classify Braille characters in the deblurred images
- Data-driven Error Correction to improve accuracy by learning common misclassification patterns
- Demonstrated robust performance under motion and sensing noise
Results
- 315 words per minute reading speed
- 87.5% character-level accuracy
- Significant speed improvement over prior static tactile methods
Notes
This work highlights the importance of active perception and motion-driven sensing for efficient robotic interaction.