A Control Strategy for Overcoming Obstacles with a Reconfigurable Mobile Robot

Abstract

Reconfigurable robots for inspection usually transport various equipment to handle inspection missions in industrial plants (mining & oil) that have traversable obstacles. To tackle the problem of overcoming an obstacle, a procedure of negotiation formed in two stages is considered. A detection one, where the robot decides whether an obstacle is passable. A transition one, that depends on a state machine. In this work, we focused on the transition stage, which is based on a motion sequence and control rules for the active joints. To achieve the necessary configuration for the robot in each of the transition states, a Proportional Control is used. Simulations are performed in the CoppeliaSim environment to adjust the parameters of the control algorithm. To validate the performance of the proposed strategy, several experimental tests were carried out using the ROSI mobile robot.