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Active camera stabilization to enhance the vision of agile legged robots

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2015

Stéphane Bazeille ,
Jesus Ortiz Open the ORCID record for Jesus Ortiz [Opens in a new window] ,
Francesco Rovida ,
Marco Camurri ,
Anis Meguenani ,
Darwin G. Caldwell  and
Claudio Semini
Stéphane Bazeille*
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Jesus Ortiz
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Francesco Rovida
Affiliation:
Robotics, Vision and Machine Intelligence Lab, Aalborg University of Copenhagen AC Meyers Vaenge 15 DK-2450 Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]
Marco Camurri
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Anis Meguenani
Affiliation:
Institut des Systemes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Université Pierre et Marie Curie Pyramide - Tour 55, 4 Place JUSSIEU 75005 Paris, France. E-mail: [email protected]
Darwin G. Caldwell
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Claudio Semini
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Summary

Legged robots have the potential to navigate in more challenging terrains than wheeled robots. Unfortunately, their control is more demanding, because they have to deal with the common tasks of mapping and path planning as well as more specific issues of legged locomotion, like balancing and foothold planning. In this paper, we present the integration and the development of a stabilized vision system on the fully torque-controlled hydraulically actuated quadruped robot (HyQ). The active head added onto the robot is composed of a fast pan and tilt unit (PTU) and a high-resolution wide angle stereo camera. The PTU enables camera gaze shifting to a specific area in the environment (both to extend and refine the map) or to track an object while navigating. Moreover, as the quadruped locomotion induces strong regular vibrations, impacts or slippages on rough terrain, we took advantage of the PTU to mechanically compensate for the robot's motions. In this paper, we demonstrate the influence of legged locomotion on the quality of the visual data stream by providing a detailed study of HyQ's motions, which are compared against a rough terrain wheeled robot of the same size. Our proposed Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based controller allows us to decouple the camera from the robot motions. We show through experiments that, by stabilizing the image feedback, we can improve the onboard vision-based processes of tracking and mapping. In particular, during the outdoor tests on the quadruped robot, the use of our camera stabilization system improved the accuracy on the 3D maps by 25%, with a decrease of 50% of mapping failures.

Keywords

Stereo visionCamera stabilizationActive headSimultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)Color trackingQuadruped robot
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , April 2017 , pp. 942 - 960
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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