An Outdoor Vehicle Control Method Based Body Configuration Information

Abstract

In our current research, we are developing a holonomic mobile vehicle which is capable of running over the irregular terrain. Our developing vehicle realizes omni-directional motion on flat floor using special wheels and passes over non-flat ground using the passive suspension mechanism. This paper proposes a vehicle control method according to change of vehicle’s body configuration for passing over the irregular terrain. The developed vehicle utilizes the passive suspension mechanism connected by two free joints that provide to change the body configuration on the terrain condition. Therefore, it is required to coordinate the suitable rotation velocity of each wheel according to the body configuration. In our previous work, the vehicle motion in sagital plane (2D) was discussed and the control reference calculation method based on the body configuration was proposed. However, there are various types of irregular terrain in the general environment and our method must be extended considering to pass over such environment. In this paper, we extended our method to adapt the 3D irregular terrain. The performance of our proposed method is verified by the experiments using our prototype vehicle.