Legged Robot State Estimation in Slippery Environments Using Invariant Extended Kalman Filter with Velocity Update

This paper proposes a state estimator for legged robots operating in slippery environments. An Invariant Extended Kalman Filter (InEKF) is implemented to fuse inertial and velocity measurements from a tracking camera and leg kinematic constraints. {\color{black}The misalignment between the camera and the robot-frame is also modeled thus enabling auto-calibration of camera pose.} The leg kinematics based velocity measurement is formulated as a right-invariant observation. Nonlinear observability analysis shows that other than the rotation around the gravity vector and the absolute position, all states are observable except for some singular cases. Discrete observability analysis demonstrates that our filter is consistent with the underlying nonlinear system. An online noise parameter tuning method is developed to adapt to the highly time-varying camera measurement noise. The proposed method is experimentally validated on a Cassie bipedal robot walking over slippery terrain. A video for the experiment can be found at https://youtu.be/VIqJL0cUr7s.

Multicopter attitude control for recovery from large disturbances

We present a novel, high-performance attitude control law for multicopters, with a view to recovery from large disturbances. The controller is compared to three well-established alternatives from the literature. All controllers considered are identical to first order, but differ in their computation of the attitude error. We show that the popular use of the skew-symmetric part of the rotation matrix is problematic from a safety perspective, and specifically that the closed loop system may linger at large attitude errors for an arbitrary duration (leading to potential failures of practical systems). The novel proposed controller prioritizes the error in the vehicle thrust direction, and is shown to outperform a similar, existing controller from the literature. Stability follows via a Lyapunov function, and the controller is validated in experiments. This novel controller is especially attractive in safety-critical situations, where a multicopter may be required to recover from large initial disturbances.