Haptic Inspection of Planetary Soils With Legged Robots

Kolvenbach, Hendrik; Bärtschi, Christian; Wellhausen, Lorenz; Grandia, Ruben; Hutter, Marco

doi:10.1109/lra.2019.2896732

Cited by 57 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(31 reference statements)

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“…Nevertheless, also a smaller setup consisting of only IMUs achieves a generally good performance. This matches previous findings on the smaller sewer inspection data set (Kolvenbach et al, 2019) and a data set used for planetary soil classification (Kolvenbach et al, 2019).…”

Section: Sewer Inspection With Quadruped Robotssupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Similar to humans, legged robots can probe their environment tactilely by using their limbs (Hoepflinger, Remy, Hutter, Spinello, & Siegwart, 2010; Kolvenbach, Bärtschi, Wellhausen, Grandia, & Hutter, 2019). We have successfully deployed ANYmal (Hutter, Gehring et al, 2017), an autonomous quadruped robot, in the sewers of Zurich as shown in the previous work (Kolvenbach et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards autonomous inspection of concrete deterioration in sewers with legged robots

Kolvenbach

Wisth

Buchanan

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

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The regular inspection of sewer systems is essential to assess the level of degradation and to plan maintenance work. Currently, human inspectors must walk through sewers and use their sense of touch to inspect the roughness of the floor and check for cracks. The sense of touch is used since the floor is often covered by (waste) water and biofilm, which renders visual inspection very challenging. In this paper, we demonstrate a robotic inspection system which evaluates concrete deterioration using tactile interaction. We deployed the quadruped robot ANYmal in the sewers of Zurich and commanded it using shared autonomy for several such missions. The inspection itself is realized via a well-defined scratching motion using one of the limbs on the sewer floor. Inertial and force/torque sensors embedded within specially designed feet captured the resulting vibrations. A pretrained support vector machine (SVM) is evaluated to assess the state of the concrete. The results of the classification are then displayed in a three-dimensional map recorded by the robot for easy visualization and assessment. To train the SVM we recorded 625 samples with ground truth labels provided by professional sewer inspectors. We make this data set publicly available. We achieved deterioration level estimates within three classes of more than 92% accuracy. During the four deployment missions, we covered a total distance of 300 m and acquired 130 inspection samples.

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Section: Sewer Inspection With Quadruped Robotssupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards autonomous inspection of concrete deterioration in sewers with legged robots

Kolvenbach

Wisth

Buchanan

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

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“…This allows the feet to be used to inspect the environment as shown in [44]. With the right sensors, feet can be used as adaptive probes that are able to enhance the perception of unstructured environments through haptic reasoning, as we have shown in a previous work [45]. Especially in the case of impaired vision, visual and haptic information can be integrated to assess the shape and softness of the surroundings [46].…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Feet for Quadrupedal Walkers

et al. 2022

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The vast majority of state-of-the-art walking robots employ flat or ball feet for locomotion, presenting limitations while stepping on obstacles, slopes, or unstructured terrain. Moreover, traditional feet for quadrupeds lack sensing systems that are able to provide information about the environment and about the foot interaction with the surroundings. This further diminishes their value. Inspired by our previous work on soft feet for bipedal robots, we present the SoftFoot-Q, an articulated adaptive foot for quadrupeds. This device is conceived to be robust and able to overcome the limitations of currently employed feet. The core idea behind our adaptive foot design is first introduced and validated through a simplified mathematical formulation of the problem. Subsequently, we present the chosen mechanical implementation to attempt overcoming current limitations. The realized prototype of adaptive foot is integrated and tested on the compliantly actuated quadrupedal robot ANYmal together with an ROS-based real-time foot pose reconstruction software. Both extensive field tests and indoor experiments show noticeable performance improvements, in terms of reduced slippage of the robot, with respect to both flat and ball feet.

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“…Automatic class discovery has been achieved via clustering of terrain on a full legged system while walking [15]. Estimating physical ground properties has, to the best of our knowledge, only been demonstrated on a singleleg test bench [16] and on full legged systems using an active probing motion [17], [18], but not during locomotion.…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%