As home robotics gains traction, robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering companionship and assistance. Quadruped robots, particularly those resembling dogs, have emerged as popular alternatives for traditional pets. However, user feedback highlights concerns about the noise these robots generate during walking at home, particularly the loud footstep sound. To address this issue, we propose a sim-to-real based reinforcement learning (RL) approach to minimize the foot contact velocity highly related to the footstep sound. Our framework incorporates three key elements: learning varying PD gains to actively dampen and stiffen each joint, utilizing foot contact sensors, and employing curriculum learning to gradually enforce penalties on foot contact velocity. Experiments demonstrate that our learned policy achieves superior quietness compared to a RL baseline and the carefully handcrafted Sony commercial controllers. Furthermore, the trade-off between robustness and quietness is shown. This research contributes to developing quieter and more user-friendly robotic companions in home environments.

Personal mobile robotic assistants are expected to find wide applications in industry and healthcare. For example, people with limited mobility can benefit from robots helping with daily tasks, or construction workers can have robots perform precision monitoring tasks on-site. However, manually steering a robot while in motion requires significant concentration from the operator, especially in tight or crowded spaces. This reduces walking speed, and the constant need for vigilance increases fatigue and, thus, the risk of accidents. This work presents a virtual leash with which a robot can naturally follow an operator. We use a sensor fusion based on a custom-built RF transponder, RGB cameras, and a LiDAR. In addition, we customize a local avoidance planner for legged platforms, which enables us to navigate dynamic and narrow environments. We successfully validate on the ANYmal platform the robustness and performance of our entire pipeline in real-world experiments.

Combining manipulation with the mobility of legged robots is essential for a wide range of robotic applications. However, integrating an arm with a mobile base significantly increases the system's complexity, making precise end-effector control challenging. Existing model-based approaches are often constrained by their modeling assumptions, leading to limited robustness. Meanwhile, recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) implementations restrict the arm's workspace to be in front of the robot or track only the position to obtain decent tracking accuracy. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing a whole-body RL formulation for end-effector pose tracking in a large workspace on rough, unstructured terrains. Our proposed method involves a terrain-aware sampling strategy for the robot's initial configuration and end-effector pose commands, as well as a game-based curriculum to extend the robot's operating range. We validate our approach on the ANYmal quadrupedal robot with a six DoF robotic arm. Through our experiments, we show that the learned controller achieves precise command tracking over a large workspace and adapts across varying terrains such as stairs and slopes. On deployment, it achieves a pose-tracking error of 2.64 cm and 3.64 degrees, outperforming existing competitive baselines.

Assistance robots are the future for people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelchairs only provide limited additional mobility at the cost of increased size. We present a mouth joystick control interface, augmented with voice commands, for an independent quadrupedal assistance robot with an arm. We validate and showcase our system in the Cybathlon Challenges February 2024 Assistance Robot Race, where we solve four everyday tasks in record time, winning first place. Our system remains generic and sets the basis for a platform that could help and provide independence in the everyday lives of people in wheelchairs.

Globally rising demand for transportation by rail is pushing existing infrastructure to its capacity limits, necessitating the development of accurate, robust, and high-frequency positioning systems to ensure safe and efficient train operation. As individual sensor modalities cannot satisfy the strict requirements of robustness and safety, a combination thereof is required. We propose a path-constrained sensor fusion framework to integrate various modalities while leveraging the unique characteristics of the railway network. To reflect the constrained motion of rail vehicles along their tracks, the state is modeled in 1D along the track geometry. We further leverage the limited action space of a train by employing a novel multi-hypothesis tracking to account for multiple possible trajectories a vehicle can take through the railway network. We demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of our fusion framework on multiple tram datasets recorded in the city of Zurich, utilizing Visual-Inertial Odometry for local motion estimation and a standard GNSS for global localization. We evaluate our results using ground truth localizations recorded with a RTK-GNSS, and compare our method to standard baselines. A Root Mean Square Error of 4.78 m and a track selectivity score of up to 94.9 % have been achieved.

Reliable obstacle detection on railways could help prevent collisions that result in injuries and potentially damage or derail the train. Unfortunately, generic object detectors do not have enough classes to account for all possible scenarios, and datasets featuring objects on railways are challenging to obtain. We propose utilizing a shallow network to learn railway segmentation from normal railway images. The limited receptive field of the network prevents overconfident predictions and allows the network to focus on the locally very distinct and repetitive patterns of the railway environment. Additionally, we explore the controlled inclusion of global information by learning to hallucinate obstacle-free images. We evaluate our method on a custom dataset featuring railway images with artificially augmented obstacles. Our proposed method outperforms other learning-based baseline methods.

Integration of multiple sensor modalities and deep learning into Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems are areas of significant interest in current research. Multi-modality is a stepping stone towards achieving robustness in challenging environments and interoperability of heterogeneous multi-robot systems with varying sensor setups. With maplab 2.0, we provide a versatile open-source platform that facilitates developing, testing, and integrating new modules and features into a fully-fledged SLAM system. Through extensive experiments, we show that maplab 2.0's accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art on the HILTI 2021 benchmark. Additionally, we showcase the flexibility of our system with three use cases: i) large-scale (approx. 10 km) multi-robot multi-session (23 missions) mapping, ii) integration of non-visual landmarks, and iii) incorporating a semantic object-based loop closure module into the mapping framework. The code is available open-source at https://github.com/ethz-asl/maplab.

We present a novel 3D mapping method leveraging the recent progress in neural implicit representation for 3D reconstruction. Most existing state-of-the-art neural implicit representation methods are limited to object-level reconstructions and can not incrementally perform updates given new data. In this work, we propose a fusion strategy and training pipeline to incrementally build and update neural implicit representations that enable the reconstruction of large scenes from sequential partial observations. By representing an arbitrarily sized scene as a grid of latent codes and performing updates directly in latent space, we show that incrementally built occupancy maps can be obtained in real-time even on a CPU. Compared to traditional approaches such as Truncated Signed Distance Fields (TSDFs), our map representation is significantly more robust in yielding a better scene completeness given noisy inputs. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in thorough experimental validation on real-world datasets with varying degrees of added pose noise.