T. Flayols,
A. Del Prete,
P. Wensing,
A. Mifsud,
M. Benallegue,
O. Stasse,
IEEE/RAS Int. Conf. on Humanoid Robotics (ICHR),
2017,
HAL
Publisher
Bib
Abstract:
This paper introduces and evaluates a family of new simple estimators to reconstruct the pose and velocity ofthe floating base. The estimation of the floating-base state isa critical challenge to whole-body control methods that relyon full-state information in high-rate feedback. Although thekinematics of grounded limbs may be used to estimate the pose and velocity of the body, modelling errors from ground irregularity, foot slip, and structural flexibilities limit the utility of estimation from kinematics alone. These difficulties havemotivated the development of sensor fusion methods to augment body-mounted IMUs with kinematic measurements. Existing methods often rely on extended Kalman filtering, which lack convergence guarantees and may present difficulties in tuning. This paper proposes two new simplifications to the floating-base state estimation problem that make use of robust off-the-shelf orientation estimators to bootstrap development. Experiments for in-place balance and walking with the HRP-2 show that the simplifications yield results on par with the accuracy reported in the literature for other methods. As further benefits, the structure of the proposed estimators prevents divergence of the estimates, simplifies tuning, and admits efficient computation. These benefits are envisioned to help accelerate the development of baseline estimators in future humanoids.