Abstract
A passive linkage mechanism is used for increasing the mobile performance of a wheeled vehicle on uneven ground. The mechanism changes its shape according to the terrain and enables all the wheels to remain grounded while the vehicle operates over rough terrain. This means that the shape of the passive linkage mechanism must correspond to that of the terrain surface, so that the vehicle can estimate the shape of the surface while passing over it. This paper proposes a new terrain-surface estimation scheme that uses a passive linkage mechanism. Our key concept is to enable changes in the vehicle body's configuration to correspond to those in the terrain's shape. Using this concept, our mobile platform estimates the shape of terrain surfaces without using external sensors; the estimated surface shapes are used to adjust the reference velocities of individual wheels, thereby improving the mobile performance of the vehicle. We test our proposed scheme by experiments using a prototype vehicle.
Highlights
Mobile robot technologies are expected to perform various tasks in structured environmentsǡ such as nuclear power plants, large factories, nursing care facilities, hospitals and homes
We propose a terrain-surface estimation scheme based on information about the vehicle’s body configuration, and use that scheme in an attempt to improve the mobile performance of the vehicle
This verifies that our proposed scheme improves the mobile performance of the wheeled vehicle with a passive linkage mechanism
Summary
Mobile robot technologies are expected to perform various tasks in structured environmentsǡ such as nuclear power plants, large factories, nursing care facilities, hospitals and homes. Such indoor environments contain narrow spaces with steps and slopes, making it difficult for generic car-like vehicles to operate. The special wheels consist of small rollers whose radii limit step-climbing performance. This type of robot can only pass over small gaps. A special crawler mechanism [9] has been proposed for omnidirectional mobile robots, but these robots can only climb over small steps. We still lack a mobile system that is well adapted to both narrow spaces and irregular terrainsǤ
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