Explicit Identification of Pointwise Terrain Gradients for Speed Compensation of Four Driving Tracks in Passively Articulated Tracked Mobile Robot

Haneul Jeon and Donghun Lee ()
Additional contact information
Haneul Jeon: Mechanical Engineering Department, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea
Donghun Lee: Mechanical Engineering Department, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: Tracked mobile robots can overcome the limitations of wheeled and legged robots in environments, such as construction and mining, but there are still significant challenges to be addressed in terms of trajectory tracking. This study proposes a kinematic strategy to improve the trajectory-tracking performance of a PASTRo (Passively Articulated Suspension based Track-typed mobile robot), which comprises four tracks, two rockers, a differential gear, and a main body. Due to the difficulties in explicitly identifying track-terrain contact angles, suspension kinematics is used to identify track-terrain contact angles (TTCA) in arbitrarily rough terrains. Thus, the TTCA-based driving velocity projection method is proposed in this study to improve the maneuverability of PASTRo in arbitrarily rough terrains. The RecurDyn-Simulink co-simulator is used to examine the improvement of PASTRo compared to a tracked mobile robot non-suspension version. The results indicate that PASTRo has a 33.3% lower RMS(Root Mean Square) distance error, 56.3% lower RMS directional error, and 43.2% lower RMS offset error than the four-track skid-steer mobile robot (SSMR), even with planar SSMR kinematics. To improve the maneuverability of PASTRo without any information on the rough terrain, the TTCA is calculated from the suspension kinematics, and the TTCA obtained is used for both TTCA-based driving velocity projection methods. The results show that PASTRo, with the TTCA-based driving velocity projection method, has a 39.2% lower RMS distance error, 57.9% lower RMS directional error, and 51.9% lower RMS offset error than the four-track SSMR.

Keywords: skid-steer mobile robot; terrain gradient; velocity propagation; track typed mobile robot; passively articulated suspension (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/11/4/905/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/11/4/905/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:11:y:2023:i:4:p:905-:d:1064519

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().