Exploration of local surface geometry with minimum number of contact points and surface normal information

In this paper, we propose a method of exploring the surface geometry of an unknown object by touch. The method is based on the idea that a three-dimensional surface geometry can be reconstructed from two principal curvatures of the object which are estimated from three concurrent curves. First, the process to minimize the number of contact points is addressed for the approximation of an arbitrary curve, which uses normal vectors at the contact points. Then, an algorithm for reconstructing a three-dimensional local surface from four contact points, two of which can be used to compute a normal curvature, is presented. Lastly, our method is applied to cylindrical, spherical and planar objects in simulation and experiments for validation.