Motion control of an omnidirectional climbing robot based on dead reckoning method.

People involved:
  • Mahmoud Tavakoli
  • Pedro Lopes
  • Lucio Sgrigna
  • Carlos Viegas
While omnidirectional wheels enable a holonomic drive and a good maneuverability, the slippage of the wheels as an inherent characteristic of the omnidirectional wheels prevents using rotary shaft encoders as a reliable source of data for the robot’s odometry. When installed on a climbing robot, omnidirectional wheels may suffer from additional slippage on the surface. In a previous study, we described how the resulting vibration decreases the trajectory following accuracy of the robot, and why rotary encoders, as the most popular dead reckoning method cannot be used. In this paper, we address this problem by integration of low cost and light weight exteroceptive sensors, i.e. an accelerometer and an optical flow sensor. The Omniclimber climbing robot was used as the testing platform in this study. Omniclimbers are omnidirectional climbing robots that can climb and navigate over flat and curved structures.

OmniClimber-VI.

Reference axis on the robot.

Snapshots from the Omniclimber experiments on a pole of 220 mm diameter, without and with the orientation control. Rotating around the pole while keeping the robots orientation constant.

Snapshots from the Omniclimber experiments moving vertically parallel to the pole axis on a pole of 220 mm diameter, with and without the orientation control.

Schematics of the mechatronics components and sensors integrated on the Omniclimber.

Snapshots of one experiment on the flat surface in mode 3, to follow a rectangular shape with dimensions of 1000 250 mm; Yellow arrow – Robot heading direction; Red arrows – Direction of movement. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Snapshots of one experiment on the flat surface in mode 4, to follow a rectangular shape with dimensions of 1000 250 mm; Yellow arrow – robot heading direction; Red arrows – direction of movement. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

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Motion control of an omnidirectional climbing robot based on dead reckoning method

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