A Soft Landing Control for Vehicle Robot with Inverted Two-Wheeled/Stable Traveling Mode

Abstract

In this paper, a soft landing control method for a vehicle robot with an inverted two-wheeled/stable traveling mode is proposed. The conventional two-wheeled vehicles have advantages such as the capability of pivot turn compared to the vehicle robots with three or four wheels. On the other hand, the two-wheeled vehicles have disadvantages such as static instability and deterioration of the translational velocity control and inverted-pendulum control due to mutual interference. Therefore, to realize a vehicle robot having the advantages of both two-wheeled vehicles and stable traveling vehicle, this paper introduces a variable compliance control for the pitch angle direction. The variable compliance control enables the soft and stable transition between a two-wheeled mode and a stable traveling mode. By the proposed method, a soft landing and stable inverted traveling motions at the transition from two-wheel mode to stable traveling mode are realized. The proposed method makes it possible to take advantage of both inverted two-wheeled vehicles and stable traveling vehicles.