AMCO: Adaptive Multimodal Coupling of Vision and Proprioception for Quadruped Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Elnoor, Mohamed, Weerakoon, Kasun, Sathyamoorthy, Adarsh Jagan, Guan, Tianrui, Rajagopal, Vignesh, Manocha, Dinesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916167231209472
author Elnoor, Mohamed
Weerakoon, Kasun
Sathyamoorthy, Adarsh Jagan
Guan, Tianrui
Rajagopal, Vignesh
Manocha, Dinesh
author_facet Elnoor, Mohamed
Weerakoon, Kasun
Sathyamoorthy, Adarsh Jagan
Guan, Tianrui
Rajagopal, Vignesh
Manocha, Dinesh
contents We present AMCO, a novel navigation method for quadruped robots that adaptively combines vision-based and proprioception-based perception capabilities. Our approach uses three cost maps: general knowledge map; traversability history map; and current proprioception map; which are derived from a robot's vision and proprioception data, and couples them to obtain a coupled traversability cost map for navigation. The general knowledge map encodes terrains semantically segmented from visual sensing, and represents a terrain's typically expected traversability. The traversability history map encodes the robot's recent proprioceptive measurements on a terrain and its semantic segmentation as a cost map. Further, the robot's present proprioceptive measurement is encoded as a cost map in the current proprioception map. As the general knowledge map and traversability history map rely on semantic segmentation, we evaluate the reliability of the visual sensory data by estimating the brightness and motion blur of input RGB images and accordingly combine the three cost maps to obtain the coupled traversability cost map used for navigation. Leveraging this adaptive coupling, the robot can depend on the most reliable input modality available. Finally, we present a novel planner that selects appropriate gaits and velocities for traversing challenging outdoor environments using the coupled traversability cost map. We demonstrate AMCO's navigation performance in different real-world outdoor environments and observe 10.8%-34.9% reduction w.r.t. two stability metrics, and up to 50% improvement in terms of success rate compared to current navigation methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_13235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AMCO: Adaptive Multimodal Coupling of Vision and Proprioception for Quadruped Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments
Elnoor, Mohamed
Weerakoon, Kasun
Sathyamoorthy, Adarsh Jagan
Guan, Tianrui
Rajagopal, Vignesh
Manocha, Dinesh
Robotics
We present AMCO, a novel navigation method for quadruped robots that adaptively combines vision-based and proprioception-based perception capabilities. Our approach uses three cost maps: general knowledge map; traversability history map; and current proprioception map; which are derived from a robot's vision and proprioception data, and couples them to obtain a coupled traversability cost map for navigation. The general knowledge map encodes terrains semantically segmented from visual sensing, and represents a terrain's typically expected traversability. The traversability history map encodes the robot's recent proprioceptive measurements on a terrain and its semantic segmentation as a cost map. Further, the robot's present proprioceptive measurement is encoded as a cost map in the current proprioception map. As the general knowledge map and traversability history map rely on semantic segmentation, we evaluate the reliability of the visual sensory data by estimating the brightness and motion blur of input RGB images and accordingly combine the three cost maps to obtain the coupled traversability cost map used for navigation. Leveraging this adaptive coupling, the robot can depend on the most reliable input modality available. Finally, we present a novel planner that selects appropriate gaits and velocities for traversing challenging outdoor environments using the coupled traversability cost map. We demonstrate AMCO's navigation performance in different real-world outdoor environments and observe 10.8%-34.9% reduction w.r.t. two stability metrics, and up to 50% improvement in terms of success rate compared to current navigation methods.
title AMCO: Adaptive Multimodal Coupling of Vision and Proprioception for Quadruped Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13235