Papers for

mobile robot control teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Legged robots get more accurate odometry with noise-resistant imu calibration

A2I-Calib++: A Kinematics-Driven Anti-noise Active Calibration Framework for Whole-Body Multi-IMU Systems on Legged Robots

Abstract: Recently, multi-node inertial measurement unit (multi-IMU) systems have shown promise for robust odometry in legged robots. Multi-IMU fusion can improve legged robot odometry but requires accurate spatiotemporal calibration among the sensors. Existing multi-IMU calibration methods, designed for aerial or handheld platforms, face challenges on legged robots because routine locomotion may provide insufficient excitation, while foot slips, impacts, and vibrations introduce measurement disturbances. To address these challenges, we propose A2I-Calib++, a kinematics-driven anti-noise active calibration framework for body-mounted IMUs covered by the robot kinematic model. It estimates temporal offsets, extrinsic rotations and translations, and inertial biases through temporal correlation search followed by analytic spatial and bias estimation, without artificial calibration targets or complex parameter tuning for the target IMU. A2I-Calib++ comprises three core modules: 1) a Noise-Isotropy-Inspired Trajectory supported by a finite-horizon conditioning proposition that generates sufficient excitation to limit noise sensitivity; 2) a constraint-aware Adversarial Motion Priors controller that combines the anti-noise excitation with a rolling-contact reward for contact-aware execution; and 3) a contact-constrained virtual IMU that fuses pre-calibrated calf IMUs and joint kinematics under a rolling-contact model to construct the calibration reference. Furthermore, evaluations on both simulation and real-world quadruped platforms demonstrate notably reduced noise sensitivity and simulation calibration errors compared to conventional methods, together with repeatable real-world calibration and improved proprioceptive odometry accuracy for legged robots.

Wed 21 OctRobotics
The gist
Legged robots need good measurements from sensors called IMUs to know where they are and how they're moving. However, rough walking often causes noisy sensor data that makes this hard. The authors developed a new method called A2I-Calib++ that uses the robot’s body movements and smart controls to better align multiple IMUs even with noise and slipping. Their tests show it improves sensor calibration and helps robots better understand their own movements.
Open → 2610.29438v1

Visuomotor policy achieves millimeter robotic docking with geometric features

GR-VIP: Geometric representation conditioning for precise visuomotor policy

Abstract: Achieving precise terminal position and heading alignment remains a significant challenge for learning-based mobile robot control. Recent vision-based learning methods have shown promise for precise target-relative control and generalization to unseen environments with pretrained visual encoders, but general-purpose visual representations are not specifically designed to capture the fine-grained spatial differences between current and goal views required for precise control, and real-world demonstrations combining millimeter-scale terminal accuracy with zero-shot transfer across environments remain limited. To address these challenges, we propose Geometric Representation Conditioning for Precise Visuomotor Policy (GR-VIP), a goal-conditioned visuomotor policy that leverages a visual encoder pretrained for relative camera pose estimation. Rather than using the final relative-pose estimate, GR-VIP conditions action prediction on the dense relational features produced before pose regression, preserving fine-grained cross-view information for learning corrective actions from demonstrations. We evaluate GR-VIP on a real-world docking task and demonstrate high docking success rates and millimeter-scale terminal accuracy in both the training and unseen environments, without additional training for transfer. Furthermore, supplementary experiments illustrate the policy's ability to align with non-docking targets and complete docking under a tested low-light condition.

Fri 16 OctRobotics
The gist
Getting robots to move precisely to a spot and angle is very hard, especially using cameras. The authors designed a new way for a robot to understand tiny differences between where it is and where it should be by using special visual features related to camera positions. Their robot could dock very accurately within millimeters and worked well even in new places it hadn't seen before or in low light. This method helps robots control their movements better by focusing on detailed visual clues instead of just general images.
Open → 2610.22997v1