A goal of robotics has been to develop mechanisms that have the efficiency and speed of wheeled robots with the terrain flexibility of legged robots. In previous work, we have proposed a unique three-legged mechanism, the rotopod, designed to integrate these two useful approaches to locomotion. In this paper, we present an analysis of the variety of gaits that can be exhibited by the rotopod. W...

This paper introduces the basis of a graphical software application, designed for low cost hardware, as a general, flexible and open platform to work on robotics. VirtualRobot has proven to be a useful tool in many fields of robotics, such as manipulator programming, mobile robots control (wheeled, sub-aquatic and walking robots), distance computation, sensor simulation, collision detection, mo...

The paper discusses the functional design and the embodiment design of Epi.q Lizard, which is the last version of the Epi.q ground mobile robots family. Epi.q robots are equipped with underactuated stepping triple wheel locomotion units with epicyclical gearings, capable of switching between wheeled and legged locomotion without control intervention, depending on the dynamic condition of the ve...

This paper considers the design of an adaptive trajectory tracking control strategy of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots which is based on H∞ control method. Kinematics control laws of mobile robots is well known, therefore, developing the dynamics control is focused. It is shown that the resulting dynamics control strategy can compensate not only the physical parameters of mobile robot, but a...

The present paper deals with the coordination issues of multiple wheeled robots working in a common dynamic environment, in a decentralized manner. Two different motion planners, one based on Neural Network and other using the potential field method have been developed to plan the motion of the robots. A strategic approach has been proposed to develop the decision making support. Performance of...

Mobile robots deployed in real-world domains frequently find it difficult to process all sensor inputs, or to operate without human input and domain knowledge. At the same time, complex domains make it difficult to provide robots all relevant domain knowledge in advance, and humans are unlikely to have the time and expertise to provide elaborate and accurate feedback. This paper presents an int...

The majority of navigation algorithms for mobile robots assume that the robots possess enough computational or memory resources to carry out the necessary calculations. Especially small and lightweight devices, however, are resource-constrained and have only restricted capabilities. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning approach for mobile robots that considers the imposed constrai...

It is often the odometry accumulative error without bound after long-range movement that decreases the precision of global localization for wheeled mobile robots. Therefore, an efficient approach to odometry error modeling is proposed regarding gentle drive type mobile robots. The approximate functional expressions, between process input of odometry and non-systematic error as well as systemati...

Mobile robot navigation has remained an open problem over the last two decades. Mobile robots are required to navigate in unknown and dynamic environments, and in recent years the use of mobile robots in material handling has considerably increased. Usually workers push carts around warehouses and manually handle orders which is not very cost‐effective. To this e...

In this chapter, we present a sensor-based trajectory deformation process for nonholonomic robots. The method is based on infinitesimal perturbations of the input functions of the current trajectory. Input perturbation is computed in such a way that a an objective function decreases and that the trajectory initial and final configurations are kept unchanged. The method is then extended to docki...