End-Effector Pose Estimation in Complex Environments Using Complementary Enhancement and Adaptive Fusion of Multisensor

Redundant manipulators are suitable for working in narrow and complex environments due to their flexibility. However, a large number of joints and long slender links make it hard to obtain the accurate end-effector pose of the redundant manipulator directly through the encoders. In this paper, a pose estimation method is proposed with the fusion of vision sensors, inertial sensors, and encoders. Firstly, according to the complementary characteristics of each measurement unit in the sensors, the original data is corrected and enhanced. Furthermore, an improved Kalman filter (KF) algorithm is adopted for data fusion by establishing the nonlinear motion prediction of the end-effector and the synchronization update model of the multirate sensors. Finally, the radial basis function (RBF) neural network is used to adaptively adjust the fusion parameters. It is verified in experiments that the proposed method achieves better performances on estimation error and update frequency than the original extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm, especially in complex environments.