**4. Tactile Data Acquisition**

Psychological studies on human tactile perception reveal the contribution of several forms of tactile information to be interpreted to understand a stimulus. Cutaneous data captured by skin can provide information about the temperature, vibration, roughness, and local deformations on the surface. On the other hand, kinesthetic data from muscles, joints, and bones can help make an estimation of the approximate weight and global shape of an interacted object.

In order to recognize an object by touch, roughness, and discontinuities of object's surface (as cutaneous cues) and the finger movements to track the global shape (as kinesthetic cues) contribute together. On the other hand, contour following is the main exploratory procedure [2] that humans use to recognize an object. Accordingly, the following sections detail how, in this work, the cutaneous and kinesthetic cues are simulated and applied to reproduce the human sense of touch for robots.
