Attitude estimation for the biped robot with vision and Gyro sensor fusion

Abstract

Tilt sensor is required to control the attitude of the biped robot when it walks on an uneven terrain. Vision sensor, which is used for recognizing human or detecting obstacles, can be used as a tilt angle sensor by comparing current image and reference image. However, vision sensor alone has a lot of technological limitations to control biped robot such as low sampling frequency and estimation time delay. In order to verify limitations of vision sensor, experimental setup of an inverted pendulum, which represents pitch motion of the walking or running robot, is used and it is proved that only vision sensor cannot control an inverted pendulum mainly because of the time delay. In this paper, to overcome limitations of vision sensor, Kalman filter for the multi-rate sensor fusion algorithm is applied with low-quality gyro sensor. It solves limitations of the vision sensor as well as eliminates drift of gyro sensor. Through the experiment of an inverted pendulum control, it is found that the tilt estimation performance of fusion sensor isgreatly improved enough to control the attitude of an inverted pendulum. © ICROS 2011.