Watch Me Calibrate My Force-Sensing Shoes!
This addresses the need for reliable force sensing in smaller humanoid robots, enabling more precise locomotion and interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing sensor technology.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous calibration for foot force sensors in smaller humanoid robots, presenting a method that uses planned whole-body movements and optimization to estimate center of pressure and ground reaction force, achieving accurate results without manual intervention as demonstrated on a NAO platform.
This paper presents a novel method for smaller-sized humanoid robots to self-calibrate their foot force sensors. The method consists of two steps: 1. The robot is commanded to move along planned whole-body trajectories in different double support configurations. 2. The sensor parameters are determined by minimizing the error between the measured and modeled center of pressure (CoP) and ground reaction force (GRF) during the robot's movement using optimization. This is the first proposed autonomous calibration method for foot force-sensing devices in smaller humanoid robots. Furthermore, we introduce a high-accuracy manual calibration method to establish CoP ground truth, which is used to validate the measured CoP using self-calibration. The results show that the self-calibration can accurately estimate CoP and GRF without any manual intervention. Our method is demonstrated using a NAO humanoid platform and our previously presented force-sensing shoes.