Adaptive manipulation of a Hybrid Mechanism Mobile Robot

This paper reports experimental and analytical results of a Hybrid Mechanism Mobile Robot (HMMR) designed for field and military applications. The HMMR presented in this paper constitutes the second generation of a mobile robot that combines locomotion with manipulation in a symmetric invertible platform. The experimental results highlight the ability of the robot to operate in an unstructured environment and overcome obstacles that are much taller than its folded structure. The analytical results on the other hand reflect the ability of the robot to adapt the arm´s posture to the magnitude of the external load during manipulation in order to prevent tip-over instability. This adaptability is controlled by an optimization algorithm that updates the position of the mobile base with respect to the object, and accordingly, calculates a global arm configuration that minimizes the eccentricity of the external loading and maximizes the payload capacity of the arm.