Watch Me Calibrate My Force-Sensing Shoes!

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous self-calibration method for foot force sensors in small humanoid robots, utilizing movement-based optimization to accurately estimate contact forces without manual calibration.

Contribution

It presents the first autonomous calibration technique for foot force sensors in small humanoid robots, validated with a NAO platform and force-sensing shoes.

Findings

Accurately estimates CoP and GRF without manual intervention

Validated with NAO humanoid platform and force-sensing shoes

High-accuracy manual calibration used for validation

Abstract

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.