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arXiv · 1909.09096

Vision-Based Proprioceptive Sensing for Soft Inflatable Actuators

Peter Werner·Matthias Hofer·Carmelo Sferrazza·Raffaello D'Andrea
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Abstract

This paper presents a vision-based sensing approach for a soft linear actuator, which is equipped with an integrated camera. The proposed vision-based sensing pipeline predicts the three-dimensional position of a point of interest on the actuator. To train and evaluate the algorithm, predictions are compared to ground truth data from an external motion capture system. An off-the-shelf distance sensor is integrated in a similar actuator and its performance is used as a baseline for comparison. The resulting sensing pipeline runs at 40 Hz in real-time on a standard laptop and is additionally used for closed loop elongation control of the actuator. It is shown that the approach can achieve comparable accuracy to the distance sensor.

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Peter Werner, Matthias Hofer, Carmelo Sferrazza, Raffaello D'Andrea. 2019-09-19. Vision-Based Proprioceptive Sensing for Soft Inflatable Actuators. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09096

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