Effects of Biped Humanoid Robot Walking Gaits on Sparse Visual Odometry Algorithms

摘要

Motivated by experiments showing that humans regulate their walking speed in order to improve localization performance, in this paper we explore the effects of walking gait on biped humanoid localization. We focus on step length as a proxy for speed and because of its ready applicability to current footstep planners, and we compare the performance of three different sparse visual odometry (VO) algorithms as a function of step length: a direct, a semi-direct and an indirect algorithm. The direct algorithm's performance decreased the longer the step lengths, which along with the analysis of inertial and force/torque data, point to a decrease in performance due to an increase of mechanical vibrations. The indirect algorithm's performance decreased in an opposite way, i.e., showing more errors with shorter step lengths, which we show to be due to the effects of drift over time. The semi-direct algorithm showed a performance in-between the previous two. These observations show that footstep planning could be used to improve the performance of VO algorithms in the future.