Inertial Reference Frame Based Steering Control for The Articulated Body Mobile Robot.

Abstract

This paper presents a new computationally efficient method for calculating steering control commands for the articulated body mobile robot “Koryu-II (KR-II) ”. KR-II is composed of six cylindrical segments linked in series and has a long snake-like appearance. The introduced method considers that each segment center travels over a given desired trajectory, so that, knowing the position of the foremost segment, the position of the following segments can be calculated using geometrical relationships, and therefore the bending angle Bsey of these segments, which are to be controlled, can be derived. This method is based on a trajectory planning scheme in the inertial reference frame, and tracks the segment center positions using a simple and effective numerical searching algorithm, making it feasible for real time computation. The extension of this method for the “W-Shaped Configuration” (a configuration that augments the lateral stability of the robot) steering control is also addressed, and the validity of these methods is verified by experiments on the mechanical model KR-II.