Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive information greatly enhances this capability since perceiving their surroundings allows them to adapt their controller and thus achieve higher levels of robustness. However, sensors such as LiDARs and RGB cameras do not provide sufficient information to quickly and precisely react in a highly dynamic environment since they suffer from a bandwidth-latency tradeoff. They require significant bandwidth at high frame rates while featuring significant perceptual latency at lower frame rates, thereby limiting their versatility on resource-constrained platforms. In this work, we tackle this problem by equipping our quadruped with an event camera, which does not suffer from this tradeoff due to its asynchronous and sparse operation. In leveraging the low latency of the events, we push the limits of quadruped agility and demonstrate high-speed ball catching for the first time. We show that our quadruped equipped with an event camera can catch objects with speeds up to 15 m/s from 4 meters, with a success rate of 83%. Using a VGA event camera, our method runs at 100 Hz on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin.

翻译：四足机器人因其在崎岖不平地形上的导航能力，正在征服各类室内外应用场景。外部感知信息极大增强了这一能力，因为感知周围环境使机器人能够调整控制器，从而实现更高的鲁棒性。然而，激光雷达和RGB摄像头等传感器在高度动态环境中无法提供足够快速和精确的反应信息，原因在于它们受限于带宽-延迟权衡。这些传感器在高帧率时需消耗大量带宽，而在低帧率时则存在显著的感知延迟，从而限制了它们在资源受限平台上的通用性。在本研究中，我们通过为四足机器人配备事件相机来解决这一问题——这种相机因其异步稀疏的工作特性而无需承受上述权衡。通过利用事件信号的低延迟特性，我们突破了四足机器人敏捷性的极限，首次实现了高速接球操作。实验表明，配备事件相机的四足机器人能从4米距离处成功接住速度高达15米/秒的物体，成功率达到83%。借助VGA分辨率的事件相机，我们的方法能在NVIDIA Jetson Orin平台上以100赫兹的频率运行。