Abstract
To plan people's evacuation from volcanic disasters, robotic remote observation system in restricted area would be quite useful. Thus, we conducted several field tests in some volcanic environments using tracked vehicles. As the result of those experiments, we have discovered some problems of locomotion of the conventional tracked vehicles on weak and uneven slopes. To solve the problems, we developed a multi-D.O.F. tracked vehicle, called ELF. In this research, to solve the problem of slippage in case of slope climbing, we developed a sensing system to measure the contact load of the robot, and propose a control scheme of 2-D.O.F subtracks that are relied on the contact data. In this paper, we introduce the robot system and the control scheme, and report the result of indoor experiments.
