Attitude and Steering Control of the Long Articulated Body Mobile Robot KORYU

Abstract

Many types of mobile robots have been considered so far in the robotics community, including wheeled, crawler track, and legged robots. Another class of robots composed of many articulations/segments connected in series, such as "Snake-like robots", "Train-like Robots" and "Multi-trailed vehicles/robots" has also been extensively studied. This configuration introduces advantageous characteristics such as high rough terrain adaptability and load capacity, among others. For instance, small articulated robots can tread through rubbles and be useful for inspection, search-and-rescue tasks, while larger and longer ones can be used for maintenance tasks and transportation of material, where normal vehicles cannot approach. Some ideas and proposal appeared in the literature, to build such big robots; many related studies concerning this configuration have been reported (Waldron,