Tactile Sensing and Inverse Problems.

The goal of this paper is to study how a surface force profile may be estimated from the information on strain or stress distribution detected by tactile sensors. This problem is referred to as the inverse problem since we can consider the stress or strain within an elastic material as the response due to surface loading. This inverse problem can be treated as a deconvolution problem or, more generally, as the problem of solving an operator equation of the firat kind. It is of interest to determine how such an ill-posed problem may be solved using appropriate regularization (Tikhonov 1977). In this paper, we will not consider the effects of the noises (or suppose the observations have been passed through some kind of filter) and only pay attention to deriving particular operators, analyzing their properties and using the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) approach to solve the associated equations