Kinematic and Dynamic analysis of a wheeled mobile robot designed to traverse uneven terrain without slip
In this work, we propose the design of a 3-wheeled mobile robot to
negotiate uneven terrain without slip. It is known in the literature that a wheeled mobile robot, with a
fixed length axle, will undergo slip when it moves across an uneven terrain. The use of a variable
length axle (VLA) has been proposed for motion without slip wherein a prismatic joint is used
in the axle to vary axle length. However, an unactuated VLA cannot prevent slip under dynamic effects (such as gravity or inertial loading)
whereas an actuated VLA requires
accurate measurement of slip at the wheel ground contact point (which is difficult in practice). In this work, we propose
the use of a passive joint at the wheel-axle joint allowing a lateral degree of freedom. We model the wheels as a torus and
assume the contact between wheel and ground to be single-point rigid-body contact. We
model the mobile robot, instantaneously, as a hybrid-parallel mechanism (see figure on right) with the
wheel-ground contact described by differential equations that take into account the
geometry of the wheel, the ground, and the non-holonomic constraints of no slip. We perform both kinematic and dynamic analysis and provide
simulation results showing that our proposed three-wheeled WMR can negotiate uneven terrain
without slipping.
- N. Chakraborty and A.Ghosal. ``Design for reducing slip in wheeled mobile
robots for traversing uneven terrain ,''
Transactions of the ASME, Journal of Mechanical Design,
Vol. 127, No. 5, pp. 901-909, September 2005.
- N. Chakraborty and A. Ghosal, ``Kinematics of Wheeled Mobile Robots on Uneven
Terrain,'' Mechanisms and Machine Theory,
Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 1273-1287, December 2004.
- N. Chakraborty and A. Ghosal, ``Kinematics of wheeled mobile robots with toroidal wheels on uneven terrain,'' Proceedings of ASME DETC'03, Chicago, USA, September 2003.
- N. Chakraborty and A. Ghosal, ``Kinematics of wheeled mobile robots on uneven terrain,'' Proc. of NaCoMM 2003, New Delhi, December 2003.
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