Experimental validation of tip over stability of a tracked mobile manipulator

Abstract

Mobile manipulators are highly susceptible to tip over due to the motion of the manipulator or the gradient of the slope being traversed by the robot's mobile base. This paper presents the experimental validation of the tip over stability analysis of a tracked mobile manipulator. The Force Angle stability measure is used to compute the stability index of the platform. A refined model of a tracked mobile manipulator is used to determine the ground contact points which form an input into the stability formulation. A Vicon motion capture system is used to determine the actual time of tip over of the robot. It is found that the tip over model is able to determine the tip over occurrence ahead of the actual tip over time in the majority of the test cases.

A Hybrid Tracked-Wheeled Multi-Directional Mobile Robot

“…Papadopoulos and Rey presented another stability criteria called the "Force-Angle Margin" that measures the minimum angle between the resultant force at the base and tip-over axis subjected to a low velocity tip-over assumption that was demonstrated using a vehicle simulation [37]. Physical implementation of this method was demonstrated on a Packbot mobile manipulation platform [38] that maintains stability during static operations that takes into consideration gravitational and steady state forces acting on the robot.…”

“…In review, the majority of related work regarding stability of indicators and control of mobile robots was demonstrated in simulation environments. Practical implementation has been demonstrated for online static stability control [38], and indicating moments of dynamic instability [31].…”