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  4. Support Surface Estimation for Legged Robots
 
conference paper

Support Surface Estimation for Legged Robots

Homberger, Timon
•
Wellhausen, Lorenz
•
Fankhauser, Peter
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August 12, 2019
2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

The high agility of legged systems allows them to operate in rugged outdoor environments. In these situations, knowledge about the terrain geometry is key for foothold planning to enable safe locomotion. However, on penetrable or highly compliant terrain (e.g. grass) the visibility of the supporting ground surface is obstructed, i.e. it cannot directly be perceived by depth sensors. We present a method to estimate the underlying terrain topography by fusing haptic information about foot contact closure locations with exteroceptive sensing. To obtain a dense support surface estimate from sparsely sampled footholds we apply Gaussian process regression. Exteroceptive information is integrated into the support surface estimation procedure by estimating the height of the penetrable surface layer from discrete penetration depth measurements at the footholds. The method is designed such that it provides a continuous support surface estimate even if there is only partial exteroceptive information available due to shadowing effects. Field experiments with the quadrupedal robot ANYmal show how the robot can smoothly and safely navigate in dense vegetation.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/ICRA.2019.8793646
Author(s)
Homberger, Timon
•
Wellhausen, Lorenz
•
Fankhauser, Peter
•
Hutter, Marco
Date Issued

2019-08-12

Published in
2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Start page

8470

End page

8476

Subjects

Vegetation mapping

•

Surface topography

•

Kernel

•

Estimation

•

Robot sensing systems

URL

Paper

https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/328256/Support_Surface_Estimation_Final.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

OTHER

EPFL units
NCCR-ROBOTICS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Montreal, QC, Canada

May 20-24, 2019

Available on Infoscience
October 31, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/162602
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