Design and Control of Omnidirectional Unmanned Ground Vehicles for Rough Terrain.

摘要

Research under this ARO grant has studied the design of highly agile ground vehicles. This has involved work in three related areas. First, research was performed on the design and control of ultra high-performance unmanned ground vehicles (UHP-UGVs) that utilize a new wheel drive system to achieve omnidirectional mobility in rough terrain. The result of this research was an experimental demonstration of a prototype UHP-UGV with measurable agility improvement in rough terrain compared to Ackerman or skid-steered vehicles. Next, research focused on the development of an entirely novel omnidirectional vehicle with anisotropic friction wheels. The wheels are arranged such that the robot wheel exhibits high traction in its driving direction (much like a conventional tire), but low traction when sliding laterally. Exploiting this anisotropic friction property, the proposed wheel enables a vehicle to realize omnidirectional motion (i.e. the vehicle can move any direction within the plane forward, back, or laterally). Finally, research focused on developing novel experimental methods to analyze detailed robot-terrain interaction phenomena, with an ultimate goal of developing models that will lead to improved robot mobility performance.