Safety Control for Turnover Avoidance of a Tracked Mobile Robot using Stability Indices

Safety Control for Turnover Avoidance of a Tracked Mobile Robot using Stability Indices

  This paper proposes a safety control method for a teleoperated mobile robot traveling on unknown and uneven terrain. A terrain sensor module equipped at the front of the mobile robot is developed to obtain information of front terrain. The rollover and pitchover stability indices are suggested to set up the control region for avoiding rollover and pitch over using information of front terrain and traveling information of the robot. The turnover stability space with the rollover and pitch over stability indices is presented to control for avoiding turnover effectively. In order to compensate the inconsistency between the velocity command of an operator and the actual velocity of the robot, a force reflection technique with a force feedback joystick is employed. Experiments were carried out with the ROBHAZ-DT mobile robot and the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method was verified.