An apparatus comprises a tool having a first portion and a second portion that are separated by at least a first area of articulation. A first inertial measurement unit is affixed with respect to that first portion and a second inertial measurement unit is affixed with respect to that second portion. A control circuit operably couples to those inertial measurement units and receives corresponding information regarding those portions of the tool. The control circuit can then process that received information to generate positional proprioception information as regards those monitored tool portions. By one approach, the control circuit generates that positional proprioception information by first determining an absolute orientation of each of the tool portions independent of one another and then calculating a differential pose as a function of the determined absolute orientation of those tool portions.

The present disclosure provides systems and methods for training a robot. The systems and methods may provide a robotic system. The robotic system may comprise a trainable robot and a sensor. The sensor may be attached to at least one physical tool. The method may comprise using the sensor to capture movement from a user operating the at least one physical tool. The method may include using at least the movement captured to train the robot, such that upon training, the robot may be trained to perform at least the movement.

The present disclosure provides a method for controlling a handheld gimbal and a handheld gimbal. The method for controlling a handheld gimbal includes: upon rotation of a handheld gimbal, obtaining current attitude information of a photographing device and current attitude information of a handle; according to the current attitude information of the photographing device and the current attitude information of the handle, obtaining target attitude information of the photographing device; according to the current attitude information of the photographing device and the target attitude information, controlling a shaft joint of the handheld gimbal to rotate so that the attitude of the photographing device follows the attitude of the handle.

An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is placed on a robot and outputs inertial information such as angular velocity and linear acceleration of the tip to which it is attached. A robot controller implements a recursive estimation algorithm to fuse robot encoder values with IMU data to determine a statistically optimized estimated position of the robot tip.

A method for reducing kinematic error in a joint includes providing an acceleration sensor; selecting a trajectory to be followed by the acceleration sensor; estimating expected acceleration values the sensor will experience along the trajectory; outputting initial commands for moving the sensor along the trajectory; obtaining corrected commands by adding to a parameter specified in an initial command a kinematic error correction and inputting the corrected commands into a joint controller; recording acceleration values to which the sensor is subject while moving according to the corrected commands; judging whether a deviation between the expected acceleration values and the recorded acceleration values exceeds a predetermined threshold, and when the deviation is judged to exceed the threshold, modifying the kinematic error correction so as to reduce the deviation.