Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive information greatly enhances this capability since perceiving their surroundings allows them to adapt their controller and thus achieve higher levels of robustness. However, sensors such as LiDARs and RGB cameras do not provide sufficient information to quickly and precisely react in a highly dynamic environment since they suffer from a bandwidth-latency tradeoff. They require significant bandwidth at high frame rates while featuring significant perceptual latency at lower frame rates, thereby limiting their versatility on resource-constrained platforms. In this work, we tackle this problem by equipping our quadruped with an event camera, which does not suffer from this tradeoff due to its asynchronous and sparse operation. In leveraging the low latency of the events, we push the limits of quadruped agility and demonstrate high-speed ball catching for the first time. We show that our quadruped equipped with an event camera can catch objects with speeds up to 15 m/s from 4 meters, with a success rate of 83%. Using a VGA event camera, our method runs at 100 Hz on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin.
翻译:四足机器人由于其在克服复杂地形方面的优异能力而在室内外各种应用领域广泛应用。异感信息可以极大地增强机器人的适应性,因为感知周围环境可以使机器人适应控制器并从而实现更高的鲁棒性。然而,激光雷达和RGB相机等传感器在高速响应上受到限制,因为它们具有带宽-延迟折衷问题。它们需要在高帧率下具有显著的带宽,而在低帧率时具有显著的感知延迟,因此,它们在资源受限的平台上的多功能性受到限制。在这项工作中,我们通过装备事件相机来解决这个问题,由于它的异步和稀疏操作,事件相机不受此折衷的限制。利用事件的低延迟,我们提高了四足机器人的敏捷性,并首次展示了高速抓球技术。我们展示了我们装备了事件相机的四足机器人可以从4米的距离以每秒15米的速度抓住物体,成功率达到83%。使用VGA事件相机,我们的方法可以在NVIDIA Jetson Orin上以100 Hz的速度运行。