MUSE: A Real-Time Multi-Sensor State Estimator for Quadruped Robots

This paper introduces an innovative state estimator, MUSE (MUlti-sensor State Estimator), designed to enhance state estimation's accuracy and real-time performance in quadruped robot navigation. The proposed state estimator builds upon our previous work presented in [1]. It integrates data from a range of onboard sensors, including IMUs, encoders, cameras, and LiDARs, to deliver a comprehensive and reliable estimation of the robot's pose and motion, even in slippery scenarios. We tested MUSE on a Unitree Aliengo robot, successfully closing the locomotion control loop in difficult scenarios, including slippery and uneven terrain. Benchmarking against Pronto [2] and VILENS [3] showed 67.6% and 26.7% reductions in translational errors, respectively. Additionally, MUSE outperformed DLIO [4], a LiDAR-inertial odometry system in rotational errors and frequency, while the proprioceptive version of MUSE (P-MUSE) outperformed TSIF [5], with a 45.9% reduction in absolute trajectory error (ATE).

SANDRO: a Robust Solver with a Splitting Strategy for Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is a critical problem in computer vision and robotics, especially in the field of navigation. Current methods often fail when faced with high outlier rates or take a long time to converge to a suitable solution. In this work, we introduce a novel algorithm for point cloud registration called SANDRO (Splitting strategy for point cloud Alignment using Non-convex anD Robust Optimization), which combines an Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) framework with a robust loss function with graduated non-convexity. This approach is further enhanced by a splitting strategy designed to handle high outlier rates and skewed distributions of outliers. SANDRO is capable of addressing important limitations of existing methods, as in challenging scenarios where the presence of high outlier rates and point cloud symmetries significantly hinder convergence. SANDRO achieves superior performance in terms of success rate when compared to the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating a 20% improvement from the current state of the art when tested on the Redwood real dataset and 60% improvement when tested on synthetic data.

Proprioceptive State Estimation for Quadruped Robots using Invariant Kalman Filtering and Scale-Variant Robust Cost Functions

Accurate state estimation is crucial for legged robot locomotion, as it provides the necessary information to allow control and navigation. However, it is also challenging, especially in scenarios with uneven and slippery terrain. This paper presents a new Invariant Extended Kalman filter for legged robot state estimation using only proprioceptive sensors. We formulate the methodology by combining recent advances in state estimation theory with the use of robust cost functions in the measurement update. We tested our methodology on quadruped robots through experiments and public datasets, showing that we can obtain a pose drift up to 40% lower in trajectories covering a distance of over 450m, in comparison with a state-of-the-art Invariant Extended Kalman filter.

Online Non-linear Centroidal MPC with Stability Guarantees for Robust Locomotion of Legged Robots

Nonlinear model predictive locomotion controllers based on the reduced centroidal dynamics are nowadays ubiquitous in legged robots. These schemes, even if they assume an inherent simplification of the robot's dynamics, were shown to endow robots with a step-adjustment capability in reaction to small pushes, and, moreover, in the case of uncertain parameters - as unknown payloads - they were shown to be able to provide some practical, albeit limited, robustness. In this work, we provide rigorous certificates of their closed loop stability via a reformulation of the centroidal MPC controller. This is achieved thanks to a systematic procedure inspired by the machinery of adaptive control, together with ideas coming from Control Lyapunov functions. Our reformulation, in addition, provides robustness for a class of unmeasured constant disturbances. To demonstrate the generality of our approach, we validated our formulation on a new generation of humanoid robots - the 56.7 kg ergoCub, as well as on a commercially available 21 kg quadruped robot, Aliengo.

Creating a Segmented Pointcloud of Grapevines by Combining Multiple Viewpoints Through Visual Odometry

Grapevine winter pruning is a labor-intensive and repetitive process that significantly influences the quality and quantity of the grape harvest and produced wine of the following season. It requires a careful and expert detection of the point to be cut. Because of its complexity, repetitive nature and time constraint, the task requires skilled labor that needs to be trained. This extended abstract presents the computer vision pipeline employed in project Vinum, using detectron2 as a segmentation network and keypoint visual odometry to merge different observation into a single pointcloud used to make informed pruning decisions.

Non-Gaited Legged Locomotion with Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Supervised Learning

Legged robots are able to navigate complex terrains by continuously interacting with the environment through careful selection of contact sequences and timings. However, the combinatorial nature behind contact planning hinders the applicability of such optimization problems on hardware. In this work, we present a novel approach that optimizes gait sequences and respective timings for legged robots in the context of optimization-based controllers through the use of sampling-based methods and supervised learning techniques. We propose to bootstrap the search by learning an optimal value function in order to speed-up the gait planning procedure making it applicable in real-time. To validate our proposed method, we showcase its performance both in simulation and on hardware using a 22 kg electric quadruped robot. The method is assessed on different terrains, under external perturbations, and in comparison to a standard control approach where the gait sequence is fixed a priori.

Panoptic-SLAM: Visual SLAM in Dynamic Environments using Panoptic Segmentation

The majority of visual SLAM systems are not robust in dynamic scenarios. The ones that deal with dynamic objects in the scenes usually rely on deep-learning-based methods to detect and filter these objects. However, these methods cannot deal with unknown moving objects. This work presents Panoptic-SLAM, an open-source visual SLAM system robust to dynamic environments, even in the presence of unknown objects. It uses panoptic segmentation to filter dynamic objects from the scene during the state estimation process. Panoptic-SLAM is based on ORB-SLAM3, a state-of-the-art SLAM system for static environments. The implementation was tested using real-world datasets and compared with several state-of-the-art systems from the literature, including DynaSLAM, DS-SLAM, SaD-SLAM, PVO and FusingPanoptic. For example, Panoptic-SLAM is on average four times more accurate than PVO, the most recent panoptic-based approach for visual SLAM. Also, experiments were performed using a quadruped robot with an RGB-D camera to test the applicability of our method in real-world scenarios. The tests were validated by a ground-truth created with a motion capture system.

PACC: A Passive-Arm Approach for High-Payload Collaborative Carrying with Quadruped Robots Using Model Predictive Control

In this paper, we introduce the concept of using passive arm structures with intrinsic impedance for robot-robot and human-robot collaborative carrying with quadruped robots. The concept is meant for a leader-follower task and takes a minimalist approach that focuses on exploiting the robots' payload capabilities and reducing energy consumption, without compromising the robot locomotion capabilities. We introduce a preliminary arm mechanical design and describe how to use its joint displacements to guide the robot's motion. To control the robot's locomotion, we propose a decentralized Model Predictive Controller that incorporates an approximation of the arm dynamics and the estimation of the external forces from the collaborative carrying. We validate the overall system experimentally by performing both robot-robot and human-robot collaborative carrying on a stair-like obstacle and on rough terrain.

Accelerating Model Predictive Control for Legged Robots through Distributed Optimization

This paper presents a novel approach to enhance Model Predictive Control (MPC) for legged robots through Distributed Optimization. Our method focuses on decomposing the robot dynamics into smaller, parallelizable subsystems, and utilizing the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to ensure consensus among them. Each subsystem is managed by its own Optimal Control Problem, with ADMM facilitating consistency between their optimizations. This approach not only decreases the computational time but also allows for effective scaling with more complex robot configurations, facilitating the integration of additional subsystems such as articulated arms on a quadruped robot. We demonstrate, through numerical evaluations, the convergence of our approach on two systems with increasing complexity. In addition, we showcase that our approach converges towards the same solution when compared to a state-of-the-art centralized whole-body MPC implementation. Moreover, we quantitatively compare the computational efficiency of our method to the centralized approach, revealing up to a 75\% reduction in computational time. Overall, our approach offers a promising avenue for accelerating MPC solutions for legged robots, paving the way for more effective utilization of the computational performance of modern hardware.

Leveraging Symmetry in RL-based Legged Locomotion Control

Model-free reinforcement learning is a promising approach for autonomously solving challenging robotics control problems, but faces exploration difficulty without information of the robot's kinematics and dynamics morphology. The under-exploration of multiple modalities with symmetric states leads to behaviors that are often unnatural and sub-optimal. This issue becomes particularly pronounced in the context of robotic systems with morphological symmetries, such as legged robots for which the resulting asymmetric and aperiodic behaviors compromise performance, robustness, and transferability to real hardware. To mitigate this challenge, we can leverage symmetry to guide and improve the exploration in policy learning via equivariance/invariance constraints. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of two approaches to incorporate symmetry: modifying the network architectures to be strictly equivariant/invariant, and leveraging data augmentation to approximate equivariant/invariant actor-critics. We implement the methods on challenging loco-manipulation and bipedal locomotion tasks and compare with an unconstrained baseline. We find that the strictly equivariant policy consistently outperforms other methods in sample efficiency and task performance in simulation. In addition, symmetry-incorporated approaches exhibit better gait quality, higher robustness and can be deployed zero-shot in real-world experiments.