Consideration of Compliance in Sub-Crawler Dynamics for Crawler Robot

Abstract

This paper describes the compliance for sub-crawler of the crawler robots when traversing the obstacle. The dynamics and kinematics modeling will be proposed. Remote-controlled mobile robots are useful for searching around and inside collapsed buildings in a disaster. Disaster response robots will be required the high mobility on rough terrain. As widely known, an active adaptive crawler robot have high traversability to get over on rough terrain. In the present circumstances, it is hard for the operator to control its active sub-crawlers in remote control. Therefore, operators must be well trained to achieve high mobility by using remote control. semi-autonomous control system is suited in order to realize high traversability with the simple control command. On the other hand, a passive adaptive craler robot is only necessary to control the movement direction and driving speed. The satisfactory performance has been confirmed also from the results of simulation and experimentation, We think that the reason is the essential compliance properties of the passive adaptive crawler robot. The compliance model was derived from the analysis of the each traversal sequence of the active and passive adaptive crawler robot. When it compared traversal sequence of the active and passive adaptive crawler robot, it was confirmed that properties of the compliance were different. The compliance control system was designed and the collision experiment to the simple obstacle demonstrated the compliance properties of the each adaptive crawler robot.