Feeling the overturn stability of a platform

Abstract

Overturn stability is an important safety factor for platforms such as swing cranes, wheeled or legged vehicles and mobile robots. Human operators have no feeling for mass distribution. Inclination is estimated inaccurately, thus resulting in a latent risk of overturn especially for platforms operating in rough terrain. This paper presents an approach to feed the margin of overturn stability back to the operator. Opposing forces exerted by an active control level inform the operator about the margin of overturn stability. This provides a fast, unignorable and instantly interpretable feedback. Feeling the overturn stability of the platform the operator can focus fully on his task while safety and performance of the platform is improved.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>