About one way to scan a surface for a home walking robot

Abstract

The paper discusses the principles of building a home quadruped ro-bot’s vision system for stepping over obstacles and walking up stairs. The vi-sion system measures the distance to the support surface at the places where the robot’s legs may be positioned. The proposed system is based on the use of sev-eral TOF sensors to measure the distance to possible reference zones. A surface scanning model is presented to determine the reference areas. The issues of the influence of surface properties on the measurement results are considered. The influence of the instability of the sensor tilt angles and its width of the radiation pattern on the measurement accuracy is analyzed. It is shown that the use of sensors with a small angle of inclination makes it possible to measure the pa-rameters of horizontal surfaces with sufficient accuracy. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations are given to improve the accuracy of measurements. The test on the simulator showed a good match of the measured profile of the stage with the theoretical results. The proposed scanning method allows to reduce the cost of the control system, reduce the requirements for computing power and increase the battery life of the home robot.