3D Posture Estimation for a Hose-shaped Rescue Robot using a Microphone and Accelerometer Array

Abstract

This paper presents an online method that estimates a 3D posture of a hose-shaped rescue robot using a microphone and accelerometer array. Posture (shape) estimation of a self-driving hose-shaped rescue robot is crucial for handling the robot body because the unseen robot posture deforms in narrow spaces under collapsed buildings. Conventional sound-based method that uses time-differences of arrivals (TDOAs) works only on a two-dimensional surface and is often hampered by the rubble around the robot. Our method eliminates the outliers of sound-based TDOA measurements, and compensates the lack of the posture information with the tilt information measured by accelerometers. Experimental results using a 3-m hose-shaped robot that was deployed in a simple 3D structure demonstrate that our method reduces the errors of initial states to about 20cm in the 3D space.