Study of How To Sense Slippage by Motor-Tractive-Currents for Odometry of Tracked Vehicles

Abstract

An advantage of crawler mechanism is a stable navigation on uneven terrain. So many of rescue and field robots adopt such a mechanism. However, the mechanism has a problem of slippage with the ground in case of circling motion of the robot. To achieve dead-reckoning of a crawler robot, it is necessary to consider its slippage. In this research, we proposed a method to estimate slippage of crawlers quantitatively by using current sensors.These sensors measure current of motors driving crawlers. The proposed method was verified by our experiment using a crawler robot.