Toward a 6 DOF body state estimator for a hexapod robot with dynamical gaits

We report on a continuous time full body state estimator for a hexapod robot operating in the dynamical regime (entailing a significant aerial phase) on level ground that combines a conventional rate gyro with a novel leg strain based body pose estimator. We implement this estimation procedure on the robot RHex and evaluate its performance using a visual ground truth measurement system. As an independent assessment of our estimator´s quality we also compare its odometry performance to sensorless averaged open loop distance-per-stride estimates.