Haptic Eye: A Contactless Material Classification System

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate a system capable of classifying different types of materials in a contactless fashion by using active infrared thermography and machine learning algorithms. A laser diode heats the materials and the infrared camera records the thermal dissipation signature of each material. These data are then fed to machine learning algorithms to classify the materials. This system can potentially be used in teleoperation applications for robots that operate in unknown scenes.