Development of a mobile robot grasping and traversing an unknown environment based on internal sensor information

Abstract

There is a growing demand for mobile robots that can operate in inaccessible environments such as disaster sites. Such a robot that can move autonomously over unknown rough terrain needs to be able to acquire both its own position and the surrounding environment, but current robots rely mostly on external sensors. Since external sensors are susceptible to disturbances and cannot be used in some environments, a subsystem with internal sensors that are less susceptible to disturbances is necessary to operate under such circumstances. Therefore, in this research, we consider the acquisition of the surrounding environment by the internal field sensor. In this paper, we propose a method to convert the terrain information into maze information using the robot’s posture information, and to traverse the generated maze using the Adachi method. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by simulations and actual experiments.