Class Of Mobile Robots Research Articles

Automated synthesis of mobile robots of arbitrary orientation in the technological space

The research is devoted to the solution to the development of a methodology for the synthesis of mobile robots of arbitrary orientation in the technological space with systems for holding mobile robots on the moving surface to compensate for the gravitational and technological load. Mobile robots, also known in international publications as Climber Robot, are a new modification of mobile robots. The creation of this type of robotics is dictated by the need to perform
 technological operations in such areas as monitoring industrial facilities, erection and dismantling of building structures, repair and preventive maintenance of their components, maintenance of high-rise buildings of urban utilities, forest and park woodlands, etc. The operation of mobile robots acquires particular relevance in the extreme conditions of manmade disasters, which are dangerous and even unacceptable for a person's stay. The paper proposes designs of mobile robots, which are based on new principles of their synthesis. In the performed studies, in addition to the latest patented designs of mobile robots, a strategy of active synthesis of a new class of mobile robots is proposed.

INTELLIGENT CONTROLLERS FOR VELOCITY TRACKING OF TWO WHEELED INVERTED PENDULUM MOBILE ROBOT

Velocity tracking is one of the important objectives of vehicle, machines and mobile robots. A two wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) is a class of mobile robot that is open loop unstable with high nonlinearities which makes it difficult to control its velocity because of its nature of pitch falling if left unattended. In this work, three soft computing techniques were proposed to track a desired velocity of the TWIP. Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC), Neural Network Inverse Model control (NN) and an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) were designed and simulated on the TWIP model. All the three controllers have shown practically good performance in tracking the desired speed and keeping the robot in upright position and ANFIS has shown slightly better performance than FLC, while NN consumes more energy.

A Prototype Smart Materials Warehouse Application Implemented Using Custom Mobile Robots and Open Source Vision Technology Developed Using EmguCV

Customized mobile robots are commonplace in manufacturing and material handling applications. One class of mobile robots, known as Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGV), follow a fixed path along the floor using tracks, RFID tags, or magnetic tape. These robots typically travel along predetermined routes and offer limited flexibility for changes to be made or for their use in environments like hospitals or military installations. Moving away from traditional fixed AGV systems to wireless and dynamic control and monitoring presents some distinct advantages and new opportunities. This type of robot is known as an Autonomous AGV. A prototype smart materials warehouse is presented in this paper as a platform to explore some particular aspects of this technology. First, four multi-purpose mobile robots were built using off-the-shelf BattleBot kits, wireless Arduino controls, and fabricated components. Secondly, a Microsoft Kinect camera was installed on one robot for visual feedback, obstacle avoidance, and shape recognition. Lastly, a ceiling mounted IP camera was used with software developed using Visual Studio .NET and the C# wrapper for OpenCV (EmguCV) to facilitate robot path development, video processing and real-time tracking. Testing of the completed system was done in a 2000 sq. ft. mock warehouse set up with stations for shipping/receiving, storage, staging areas, and processes including cutting, milling, and turning for preparing raw stock to be used in production. As cyber-physical systems research continues to grow, the integration of computational algorithms, physical systems, wireless controls, and custom user interfaces will undoubtedly lead to their increased use throughout society. This work was completed as part of the Northwest Manufacturing Initiative at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Possibilities for applying the results of this work in the military, retail and service sectors are also identified. All hardware and software for the project was developed to facilitate future work.

Static balancing of highly reconfigurable articulated wheeled vehicles for power consumption reduction of actuators

This paper presents the static balancing of a highly reconfigurable articulated wheeled vehicles with multiple leg-wheel subsystem. Articulated wheeled vehicles are a class of mobile robots, which offer immense possibilities for enhanced locomotion-performance of autonomous mobile vehicles by virtue of the enormous reconfigurability within their articulated structure. However, changing the vehicle platform elevation could require considerable actuator power because of the payload. Hence, the main focus of this paper is to carefully evaluate various means for reducing or eliminating these static forces, principally due to the mass- and inertia-distribution within the system. It is noteworthy that although known apriori, such static forces often are significantly dependent upon the articulated-wheeled vehicle configuration. Hence, realising the static balancing for all possible configurations of vehicle imposes special set of conditions on the geometric, mass and inertial parameters. In this paper, elastic elements such as springs are used in conjunction with reconfigurable four-bar mechanism to achieve the static balancing. The essential principle is to realise that the total potential energy including the elastic potential energy stored in springs and gravitational potential energy becomes constant. Finally, we show that elimination of static torques due to gravity reduces the torque requirements and provides much more efficient design with significant reduction of the actuator sizes.

Mobile Robot Trajectory Analysis Using Computational Methods

This paper presents some considerations regarding the trajectory analysis for a class of mobile robots, namely two-wheeled differential drive mobile robots, one of the most utilized mechanical structures now in mobile robotics practice. The paper is continuing the computational analysis of the Cauchy problem associated to a mobile robot kinematics. The phaseportrait graphical tool of the mathematical soft MAPLE11, points out the influence of the initial conditions the initial velocities of the driving (left and right) wheels of the robot on the robot trajectory. Considering a pair of few simulation cases for the initial conditions brings a good reliability of the analysis. The issue of repetitive phenomena is very important to notice in this context, as in the analysis it is repeated a specific allure of the trajectory. It brings important features, both from mathematical and robotic analysis standpoint. The further changes are due to the initial conditions variations. Repetitive phenomena can be collected in order to realize a global panel of random distributed events in the kinematics of two wheeled differential drive mobile robot and to use the statistical observations in the further analysis.

Approximation-based adaptive control for a class of mobile robots with unknown skidding and slipping

An adaptive tracking control approach using function approximation technique is proposed for trajectory tracking of Type (2,0) wheeled mobile robots with unknown skidding and slipping in polar coordinates and at the dynamic level. The nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is used to estimate a nonlinear disturbance term including unknown skidding and slipping. The adaptive control system is designed via the function approximation technique using neural networks employed to compensate the NDO error. It is proved that all signals of the controlled closed-loop system are uniformly bounded and the point tracking errors converge to an adjustable neighborhood of the origin regardless of large initial tracking errors and unknown skidding and slipping. Simulation results are presented to validate the good tracking performance and robustness of the proposed control system against unknown skidding and slipping.

An Approach for Object Finding using Mobile Robots based on ACO

In this paper, we propose Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for mobile robot. This paper describes the analysis and design of a new class of mobile robots. These small robots are intended to be simple and inexpensive, and will all be physically identical, thus constituting a homogeneous team of robots. They derive their usefulness from their group actions, performing physical tasks and making cooperative decisions as a Coordinated Team. This method based on heuristic concept is used to obtain global search. Since the proposed method is very efficient, thus it can perform object finding very quickly. In the process of doing so, we first use ACO to obtain the shortest obstructed distance, which is an effective method for arbitrary shape obstacles.

A Discrete Method for Time-Optimal Motion Planning of a Class of Mobile Robots

This paper addresses the time-optimal motion planning (TOMP) problem between two configurations for a mobile robot with two independently driven wheels. Different from previous methods, in which one needs to solve a set of differential equations, a discrete method is proposed to solve this problem. The first step is to transform the TOMP problem into a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem by an iterative procedure, in which the sampling period and the control inputs are chosen as variables, and the traveling time is to be minimized. Since it is usually hard to find initial feasible solutions of an NLP problem, a method that combines the concepts of genetic algorithms (GAs) and penalty functions is also proposed. In this manner, the NLP problem can be solved since initial feasible solutions can be generated easily. Simulation results are included to show the validity of the proposed method.

Design of the "army-ant" cooperative lifting robot

This paper describes the design and development of a new class of mobile robot. These small robots are intended to be simple and inexpensive, and will all be physically identical, thus constituting a homogeneous team of robots. They derive their usefulness from their group actions, performing physical tasks and making cooperative decisions as a coordinated team. All mechanical and electrical design aspects are decided with the group-dynamical behavior in mind. Because of their behavioral resemblance to their insect counterparts, they have been named army ant robots. >