Athena Robot Base State Estimation

Sensor fusion of a Microstrain 3DM-GX3-25 IMU with robot kinematics using an Extended Kalman Filter for estimation of the robot's floating base pose. Pose estimation works well despite the fact that Athena has prosthetic lower legs, meaning that the 3DOF ankle deformation cannot be measured. The estimator was thus tuned to rely more heavily on IMU data than kinematics for base rotation corrections.

Although not demonstrated in this video, contact switching is automatically handled by thresholding endeffector force and dropping corresponding endeffector pose measurements from the filter.