Wheeled inverted pendulum type assistant robot: design concept and mobile control

This paper describes the design concept of the human assistant robot I-PENTAR (Inverted PENdulum Type Assistant Robot) aiming at the coexistence of safety and work capability and its mobile control strategy. I-PENTAR is a humanoid type robot which consists of a body with a waist joint, arms designed for safety, and a wheeled inverted pendulum mobile platform. Although the arms are designed low-power and lightweight for safety, it is able to perform tasks that require high power by utilizing its self-weight, which is the feature of a wheeled inverted pendulum mobile platform. I-PENTAR is modeled as a three dimensional robot; with controls of inclination angle, horizontal position, and steering angle to achieve high mobile capability. The motion equation is derived considering the non-holonomic constraint of the two-wheeled mobile robot, and a state feedback control method is applied for basic mobile controls wherein the control gain is calculated by the LQR method. Through several experiments of balancing, linear running, and steering, it was confirmed that the robot could realize stable mobile motion in a real environment by the proposed controller.