The (many) best thing about robots is that they don’t have to be limited to how their biological counterparts work. Depending on the specific problem your rote needs to solve, additional sensors can get you the technology: many quadrupeds lose kneecaps in addition to side cameras and butt cameras for obstacle avoidance, and cameras on their wrists to aid in navigation. . Management. But how far can I go? I don’t know, but although we haven’t reached the end of these things, the pig is now quadrupedal with a camera on the bottom of its legs.
Sensual feet are not a new idea; It is very common for quadruped robots to have some form of force sensor on the foot to detect ground contact. Putting an actual camera in there was very novel, because I didn’t know how to have one. And actually, it’s not clear how the robots at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen did it.
The elegant base of the Go1 is made of transparent acrylic, a slightly flexible plastic structure with 60 millimeters of space for the camera (640×480 and 120 frames). Although it looks complicated, at 120 grams, it doesn’t weigh much and costs only about $50 per foot ($42 of which is the camera). If not all sealed to prevent access and water ingress.
So why bother with all this complexity (which is somewhat paralyzing)? When we hear about quadrupedal robots, it is very useful to have more information that is controversial. Robots that rely on proprioceptive sensing (self-motion detection) are great, but when you start trying to move on complex surfaces like sand, your results are botched by the surface you’re stepping on. Preliminary results showed that foot vision allowed go1 to detect the flow of sand or mud around its feet, which it could use to estimate the rate and damage of robots coming into contact.
The researchers allow their hardware to improve a bit and want to try adding some tread patterns around the circumference of the foot as the Plexiglas window is quite slippery. Making the foot visually useful, such as the vision systems built into more common grippers for robotic manipulation, can help legged robots make better decisions about how to move.
Legs: Legs in Multifunctional-Based Sensor Vision for Quadruped Robots Guoi Shi, Chen Yao, No. 2024 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters