The Kinetics Observer: A Tightly Coupled Estimator for Legged Robots

In this paper, we propose the "Kinetics Observer", a novel estimator addressing the challenge of state estimation for legged robots using proprioceptive sensors (encoders, IMU and force/torque sensors). Based on a Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter, the Kinetics Observer allows the real-time simultaneous estimation of contact and perturbation forces, and of the robot's kinematics, which are accurate enough to perform proprioceptive odometry. Thanks to a visco-elastic model of the contacts linking their kinematics to the ones of the centroid of the robot, the Kinetics Observer ensures a tight coupling between the whole-body kinematics and dynamics of the robot. This coupling entails a redundancy of the measurements that enhances the robustness and the accuracy of the estimation. This estimator was tested on two humanoid robots performing long distance walking on even terrain and non-coplanar multi-contact locomotion.

3D Object Segmentation for Shelf Bin Picking by Humanoid with Deep Learning and Occupancy Voxel Grid Map

Picking objects in a narrow space such as shelf bins is an important task for humanoid to extract target object from environment. In those situations, however, there are many occlusions between the camera and objects, and this makes it difficult to segment the target object three dimensionally because of the lack of three dimentional sensor inputs. We address this problem with accumulating segmentation result with multiple camera angles, and generating voxel model of the target object. Our approach consists of two components: first is object probability prediction for input image with convolutional networks, and second is generating voxel grid map which is designed for object segmentation. We evaluated the method with the picking task experiment for target objects in narrow shelf bins. Our method generates dense 3D object segments even with occlusions, and the real robot successfuly picked target objects from the narrow space.