Artificial Sense of Balance

The project

The suitable path planning and control of a two-legged robot requires a sensor that, like the sense of balance, measures the attitude and the position in three-dimensional space. Sensor clusters commonly used for inertial navigation are inapplicable for this task because of their weight, costs and high power consumption. Due to the rapid development of automotive micromechanical sensors lots of low-cost alternatives have appeared. Though low-cost sensors have much higher measurement errors these errors can be reduced to an adequate, application-specific degree. Therefore the measurements of the sensor system have to be designed redundant and the sensor data has to be fused by an intelligent data fusion algorithm.

The inertial measurement unit developed at the Institute of Automatic Control in 2002 consists basically of three accelerations, three vibrating gyroscopes and three magnetic field sensors. In addition, the microcontroller MPC555 with the real-time operating system RTOS-UH is used as a System-on-the-Chip. Since 2002, the sensors have considerably improved but the problems concerning sensor data fusion or dirft compensation are still prevailing.

• Detailed information (poster, scaled down to A4)

Publications

A complete and searchable list of publications with abstracts and citations in bibtex format can be found here.

• Seebode, M., Strasser, R., Lilge, T., Gerth, W.: Datenfusion in einem künstlichen Gleichgewichtsorgan für autonome Roboter. 39. Regelungstechnisches Kolloquium - Kurzfassung der Beiträge, 23.02-25.02.2005, Boppard, S. 14-15.
• Strasser, R., Seebode, M.: Inertial Measureing Unit Based on Low-Cost Sensors. TNT - Tips & Trends, 2003, Nr. 3, S. 31-33, SASCO.
• Strasser, R., Seebode, M., Albert, A., Gerth, W.: Extrem kompaktes SoC-Konzept eines Gleichgewichtsorganes für einen Laufroboter. In: P. Holleczek, B. Vogel-Heuser (Hrsg.): Verteilte Echtzeitsysteme. PEARL 2003, Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2003, S. 49-58.
• Strasser, R., Seebode, M., Gerth, W.: A very small low cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for robotic applications. Symposium GYRO Technology 2003, Stuttgart, 2003, S. 18.0-18.9.