ACOUSTIC SURFACE PERCEPTION FOR IMPROVED MOBILITY OF LEGGED ROBOTS

2012-08-15
Ozkul, Mine Cuneyitoglu
Saranlı, Afşar
Yazıcıoğlu, Yiğit
A dynamically dexterous legged robot has the distinct property that the legs are continuously interacting with the environment. During walking and running, this interaction generates acoustic signals that carry considerable information about the surface being traversed, state of the robot legs and joint motors as well as the stability of the locomotion. Extracting a particular piece of information from this convolved acoustic signal however is an interesting and challenging area of research which we believe may have fundamental benefits for legged robotics research. For example, the identification of the surface that the robot travels on gives us the ability to dynamically adapt gait parameters hence improve dynamic stability. In the present paper, we investigate this particular sub-problem of surface identification using naturally occurring acoustic signals and present our results. We show that a spectral energy based feature set augmented by time derivatives and an average zero crossing rate carries enough information to accurately classify a number of commonly occurring indoor and outdoor surfaces using a popular higher dimensional vector quantizer classifier. Our experiments also suggest that VQ surface models may be velocity dependent. These initial results with a carefully collected but relatively limited dataset indicate a promising direction for our future research on improving outdoor mobility for dynamic legged robots.

Suggestions

Acoustic surface perception from naturally occurring step sounds of a dexterous hexapod robot
Ozkul, Mine Cuneyitoglu; Saranlı, Afşar; Yazıcıoğlu, Yiğit (Elsevier BV, 2013-10-01)
Legged robots that exhibit dynamic dexterity naturally interact with the surface to generate complex acoustic signals carrying rich information on the surface as well as the robot platform itself. However, the nature of a legged robot, which is a complex, hybrid dynamic system, renders the more common approach of model-based system identification impractical. The present paper focuses on acoustic surface identification and proposes a non-model-based analysis and classification approach adopted from the spee...
Acoustic surface perception through the ground interaction of compliant legs of a hexapod robot
Cüneyitoğlu Özkul, Mine; Yazıcıoğlu, Yiğit; Saranlı, Afşar; Department of Mechanical Engineering (2012)
A dynamically dexterous legged robot platform generates specific acoustic signals during the interaction with the ground and the environment. These acoustic signals are expected to contain rich information that is related to the interaction surface as a function of the position of the legs and the overall contact process mixed with the actuator sounds that initiate the movement. As the robot platform walks or runs in any environment, this convolved acoustic signal created can be processed and analyzed in re...
Optimal control of a half circular compliant legged monopod
Özkan Aydın, Yasemin; Leblebicioğlu, Mehmet Kemal; Saranlı, Afşar; Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2013)
Legged robots have complex architecture because of their nonlinear dynamics and unpredictable ground contact characteristics. They can be also dynamically stable and exhibit dynamically dexterous behaviors like running, jumping, flipping which require complex plant models that may sometimes be difficult to build. In this thesis, we focused on half circular compliant legged monopod that can be considered as a reduced-order dynamical model for the hexapod robot, called RHex. The main objective of this thesis ...
Flexible multibody dynamic modeling and simulation of rhex hexapod robot with half circular compliant legs
Oral, Gökhan; Yazıcıoğlu, Yiğit; Department of Mechanical Engineering (2008)
The focus of interest in this study is the RHex robot, which is a hexapod robot that is capable of locomotion over rugged, fractured terrain through statically and dynamically stable gaits while stability of locomotion is preserved. RHex is primarily a research platform that is based on over five years of previous research. The purpose of the study is to build a virtual prototype of RHex robot in order to simulate different behavior without manufacturing expensive prototypes. The virtual prototype is modele...
Feature Detection Performance Based Benchmarking of Motion Deblurring Methods: Applications to Vision for Legged Robots
Gultekin, Gokhan Koray; Saranlı, Afşar (Elsevier BV, 2019-02-01)
Dexterous legged robots can move on variable terrain at high speeds. The locomotion of these legged platforms on such terrain causes severe oscillations of the robot body depending on the surface and locomotion speed. Camera sensors mounted on such platforms experience the same disturbances, hence resulting in motion blur. This is a particular corruption of the image and results in information loss further resulting in degradation or loss of important image features. Although motion blur is a significant pr...
Citation Formats
M. C. Ozkul, A. Saranlı, and Y. Yazıcıoğlu, “ACOUSTIC SURFACE PERCEPTION FOR IMPROVED MOBILITY OF LEGGED ROBOTS,” 2012, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/55495.