Dominique David

Tactile texture recognition with a 3-axial force MEMS integrated artificial finger

Recently, several three-axial MEMS-based force sensors have been developed. This kind of force micro sensor is also called tactile sensor in literature for its similarities in size and sensitivity with a human mechanoreceptors. Therefore, we believe these three-axial force sensors being able to analyse textures properties while sliding on a surface, as would do a person with his finger. In this paper, we present one of these sensors packaged as an artificial finger, with a hard structure for the bone and a soft rubber for the skin. Preliminary experiments show a good sensitivity of the finger, as its ability to sense the periodic structure of fabrics or to differentiate papers from fabrics calculating a friction coefficient. Its performance for discrimination of different surfaces is then estimated on fine textures of 10 kinds of paper. Supervised classification methods are tested on the data. They lead to an automatic classifier of the 10 papers showing good performances.

Low-cost intracortical spiking recordings compression with classification abilities for implanted BMI devices

Within Brain-Machine Interface systems, cortically implanted microelectrode arrays and associated hardware have a low power budget for data sampling, processing and transmission. It is already possible to reduce neural data rates by on-site spike detection; we propose a method to further compress spiking data at a low computational cost, with the objective of maintaining clustering and classification abilities. The method relies on random binary vector projections, and simulations show that it is possible to achieve a compression ratio of 5 at virtually no cost in terms of classification errors.

Integrated intelligent sensor for the textile industry

A new sensor has been developed for pantyhose inspection. Unlike a first complete inspection machine devoted to post- manufacturing control of the whole panty, this sensor will be directly integrated on currently existing manufacturing machines, and will combine advantages of miniaturization is to design an intelligent, compact and very cheap product, which should be integrated without requiring any modifications of host machines. The sensor part was designed to achieve closed acquisition, and various solutions have been explored to maintain adequate depth of field. The illumination source will be integrated in the device. The processing part will include correction facilities and electronic processing. Finally, high-level information will be output in order to interface directly with the manufacturing machine automate.