A Purely Model-Based Approach to Object Pose and Size Estimation With Electric Sense

Abstract

In the 50s, biologists discovered that some electric fish is capable of discriminating the pose as well as the electric and geometric properties of surrounding objects by navigating and measuring the distortions of a self-generated electric field. In this article, we address the challenging issue of ellipsoidal objects pose and size estimation for underwater robots equipped with artificial electric sense. Unlike current methods, the approach can estimate both the position and size in parallel with a single straight trajectory. Neither multipolarization nor reactive self-alignment control are necessary to locate the object. The approach is a purely model-based heuristic that selects the best ellipsoid parameters among a set of potential candidates. It is based on a set of four electric measurements recorded at several positions along the robot trajectory along which the displacement is measured. The efficiency of the method is assessed over numerous experiments with different objects, several positions, and orientations, and two different kinds of water (fresh and salt water). Despite some model simplifications and experimental errors, location and size estimation errors are on average below $\text{1}\,$ cm and $\text{15}\%$ , respectively, while offering promising perspectives for real-time computation.