Main Street Autonomy Enables Humanoid Robot Ping-Pong with Automatic Sensor Calibration Solution
PITTSBURGH, PA – September 24, 2024 – Main Street Autonomy, LLC (MSA), a robotics software and solution provider, announces a successful demonstration with the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), showing a humanoid robot playing ping-pong using a precision sensor calibration.
IHMC integrated the sensor calibration generated by MSA's Calibration Anywhere software into a humanoid robot named Nadia (details online at https://www.ihmc.us/nadia-humanoid/). “The help that Main Street Autonomy provided was essential for our work,” said Dr. Robert Griffin, Research Scientist at IHMC. “Ping pong requires highly accurate data, beyond what we were able to achieve with our in-house calibration. All Main Street Autonomy needed was a little perception data, and they were able to quickly get us the information we needed to have accurate camera data from the robot.”
The help that Main Street Autonomy provided was essential for our work
Video of Nadia playing ping-pong is online: https://youtu.be/R1JfVN76kAI.
MSA's Calibration Anywhere software automates the cross-modal calibration process for perception sensors. Using only sensor data captured in any environment, the software generates 6DoF extrinsics relative to base_link for RGB and depth cameras, lidars, radars, IMUs, and GPS/GNSS antennas. It also calculates camera intrinsics and time offsets for all sensors.
“IHMC and Boardwalk Robotics have built an amazing research project,” said William Sitch, Chief Business Officer at MSA. “We are excited to have been able to help solve some calibration problems and enable humanoid-vs-human ping pong. The video is impressive!”