Design and Control of a Mobile Robot with an Articulated Body

Abstract

Mobile robots having good terrain adaptability, sufficient payload capability, and high mobility are now urgently in de mand. In this paper, design of a practical mobile robot is attempted, with an inspection task in a nuclear reactor as a concrete objective for development. The configuration of the mobile robot is first discussed. A wheel with crawler track, legs, and a snake-like articulated body are shown to be three fundamental configurations. A hybrid configuration consist ing of an articulated body and a crawler track is most ade quate for the nuclear reactor robot because of its excellent terrain adaptability, sufficient payload capability, and high mobility. Design of the joint structure of the articulated body is discussed. Basic control problems such as signal process ing for tactile sensors and control of statically indeterminant forces are also investigated. A mechanical model KR I, a robot with six articulated body segments, 16 degrees of free dom, length 1391 mm, and weight 27.8 kg, is constructed and several experiments are done to demonstrate the basic mobility of the robot and to show the validity of introducing force control.

Locomotion Principles of 1D Topology Pitch and Pitch-Yaw-Connecting Modular Robots

“…Robots with a wheeled and chain-track vehicle are relatively portable due to high adaptability to unstructured environments. It is noted that the first modular prototype (Hirose, 1990) with powered wheels was designed by Hirose and Morishima, which consists of several vertical cylindrical segments. The robot looks like a train.…”

Serpentine Robots for Industrial Inspection and Surveillance

“…As our work is focused on serpentine robots we will limit the following literature review to this scope. The first practical realization of a serpentine robot, called KR-I, was introduced by Hirose and Morishima (1990) and later improved with version KR-II (Hirose et al, 1991). This first serpentine robot was large and heavy, weighing in at 350 kg.…”

JL-2: A Mobile Multi-robot System with Docking and Manipulating Capabilities

“…Self-reconfiguration technology is expected to be one of the key answers of how to combine flexibility, robustness, ability to self-repair and all-terrain navigation in one mobile robot system et al, 2003), which will serve for applications like space explorations (Visentin, G.;et al, 2001), rescue (Casper, J.;Murphy, R.R., 2000) or civil exploration Morishima, A., 1990). For a self-reconfigurable mobile robotic system, besides the communication among robots, an innovative cooperation is achieved by self-reconfiguration, that is, the capability to actively connect and disconnect, and to adjust the postures of the robots to enhance their locomotion abilities in the connected state.…”