Practical control of a rescue robot while maneuvering on uneven terrain

This paper presents the maneuvering stabilization method for the rescue robot. In general, the stability index such as center of mass (CoM), zero moment point (ZMP), moment height stability (MHS), and force angle (FA) measure during maneuvering can be used for the mobile manipulator. Among these stability indices, the appropriate stability index can be determined according to the target application. In this paper, the new rescue robot is introduced to accomplish various missions including the rescue and maneuver with a wounded person. The CoM as the stability index is determined due to relatively low closed-loop bandwidth of the tracked lower body for the rescue robot. Therefore, the maneuvering stability can be practically obtained by using the CoM tracking control method. Furthermore, the position-based motion control method using the closed-loop inverse kinematics (CLIK) algorithm is used for the HURCULES. To verify the effectiveness of the CoM tracking controller using the CLIK method, the experiments were conducted on a longitudinal slope and uneven terrain. Satisfactory performance of the maneuvering stabilization was obtained from the experimental results.