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arXiv · 2110.14516

Self-Contained Kinematic Calibration of a Novel Whole-Body Artificial Skin for Human-Robot Collaboration

Kandai Watanabe·Matthew Strong·Mary West·Caleb Escobedo·Ander Aramburu·Krishna Chaitanya Kodur·Alessandro Roncone
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Abstract

In this paper, we present an accelerometer-based kinematic calibration algorithm to accurately estimate the pose of multiple sensor units distributed along a robot body. Our approach is self-contained, can be used on any robot provided with a Denavit-Hartenberg kinematic model, and on any skin equipped with Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). To validate the proposed method, we first conduct extensive experimentation in simulation and demonstrate a sub-cm positional error from ground truth data --an improvement of six times with respect to prior work; subsequently, we then perform a real-world evaluation on a seven degrees-of-freedom collaborative platform. For this purpose, we additionally introduce a novel design for a stand-alone artificial skin equipped with an IMU for use with the proposed algorithm and a proximity sensor for sensing distance to nearby objects. In conclusion, in this work, we demonstrate seamless integration between a novel hardware design, an accurate calibration method, and preliminary work on applications: the high positional accuracy effectively enables to locate distributed proximity data and allows for a distributed avoidance controller to safely avoid obstacles and people without the need of additional sensing.

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Kandai Watanabe, Matthew Strong, Mary West, Caleb Escobedo, Ander Aramburu, Krishna Chaitanya Kodur, Alessandro Roncone. 2021-10-27. Self-Contained Kinematic Calibration of a Novel Whole-Body Artificial Skin for Human-Robot Collaboration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14516

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