Abstract
This paper presents a development of a novel traction and transfer mobile robot with omni-directional platform. In the environment where there are moving obstacles like human, the transfer robot has to arrive at the goal safely with a product. To solve this problem, the translation velocity and the rotation velocity are controlled independently. The translation velocity is decided based on the multi time scale behavior control method to avoid moving obstacles and the rotation velocity is decided based on the path direction. This method focuses attention on differences of time scales among problems that a robot confronts and is concretized through a modification of the virtual potential field method. For each problem having a time scale, the corresponding module is constructed and virtual potential field is generated. Virtual force calculated from each potential field is used for generating the velocity command. In this paper, this obstacle avoidance algorithm and a way to mount this algorithm on an autonomous omni-directional mobile robot with a scanner range sensor are described. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the experiments of avoiding human using a robot with an omni-directional platform and a Laser Range Finder (LRF) were carried out.
