Event Augmentation for Contact Force Measurements

Neuromorphic vision sensor is an attractive technology that offers high dynamic range, and low latency which are crucial in robotic applications. However, the lack of event-based data in this field, limits the sensors' performance in a real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a novel augmentation technique for neuromorphic vision sensors to improve contact force measurements from events. The proposed method shifts a proportion of events across the time domain, 'Temporal Event Shifting', to augment the dataset. A new set of grasping experiments is performed to validate and analyze the effectiveness of the proposed augmentation method for contact force measurements. The results indicate that temporal event shifting is highly effective augmentation method which improves the models' accuracy for the contact force estimation by thirty percent without performing new experiments.