Semiautonomous recovery system from a stuck state of an articulated mobile robot.

A semiautonomous system is presented in this paper that recovers an articulated mobile robot from a stuck state in which the robot cannot move forward due to contact with the environment. Assuming the specific robot, the stuck states are classified into four types, depending on the position of contact with the environment. In the recovery system, the contact area causing the movement failure is identified using a contact position and magnitude of contact force obtained by the pressure sensor mounted on the robot. Motion candidates for recovery from each stuck state are autonomously calculated and presented to the operator via the user interface. The operator then selects an appropriate motion from the candidates, and the robot performs the recovery motion. An articulated mobile robot with sensors was developed, and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. As a result, the recovery of the robot from each stuck state using the proposed system was verified.