Quadruped robot target following based on a gimbal mechanism

Human-robot collaboration is gradually becoming the way of life and production in the future. In this work, we focus on promoting the application scenarios of robots that can autonomously follow users, and propose a quadruped robot that can achieve autonomous following in complex environments. To address the problem that traditional quadruped robots using fixed visual sensors easily lose track of the target, we propose a method of using a gimbal mechanism equipped with a visual sensor for visual servoing tracking. By combining the chassis direction to plan the target servo strategy and controlling the gimbal rotation, we can achieve visual target following. On this basis, this paper controls the foot trajectory by using the cubic spline interpolation method, so that the robot can walk along various expected trajectories to achieve target following. This paper uses a field-of-view evaluation index to evaluate the tracking performance of this method and proves the effectiveness of the proposed target following method through experiments.