학술논문

EV-Catcher: High-Speed Object Catching Using Low-Latency Event-Based Neural Networks
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 7(4):8737-8744 Oct, 2022
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Robot vision systems
Cameras
Real-time systems
Sensor systems
Sensors
Planning
Time factors
Task analysis
Low latency communication
Standards
Sensor-based control
visual tracking
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Event-based sensors have recently drawn increasing interest in robotic perception due to their lower latency, higher dynamic range, and lower bandwidth requirements compared to standard CMOS-based imagers. These properties make them ideal tools for real-time perception tasks in highly dynamic environments. In this work, we demonstrate an application where event cameras excel: accurately estimating the impact location of fast-moving objects. We introduce a lightweight event representation called Binary Event History Image (BEHI) to encode event data at low latency, as well as a learning-based approach that allows real-time inference of a confidence-enabled control signal to the robot. To validate our approach, we present an experimental catching system in which we catch fast-flying ping-pong balls. We show that the system is capable of achieving a success rate of 81% in catching balls targeted at different locations, with a velocity of up to $13\,\text{m/s}$ even on compute-constrained embedded platforms such as the Nvidia Jetson NX.