DEVELOPMENT OF OMNIDIRECTIONAL VEHICLE ON WATER (O-VOW) USING INFORMATION OF INCLINATION OF THE VEHICLE

摘要

A lot of unique transportation devices on the ground have been developed. Segway is the impressive one among them. On the other hand, on water, there are a few personal devices, which sometimes need paddling to move. If the personal mobility that make it possible to move intuitively and quickly on water is realized, it will be useful for survey of rivers and ponds, rescue, amusement and so on. Therefore, in this study, we propose an omnidirectional vehicle on water (O-VOW) which is controlled according to information of the inclination based on a rider's balance as shown in Fig. 1. This vehicle realizes an intuitive navigation on water. Since it moves in all directions, the rider can operate it even at a narrow channel without turning. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section a developed prototype is explained. The control scheme of thrusters and the structure of O-VOW are illustrated in Section 3. In Section 4, preliminary experiments and riding tests are examined and the effectiveness of O-VOW is shown. Finally, Section 5 provides the conclusions and future works.