Enhanced Robot Position Control Using Force Information for Mobile Robots : Influences of Obstacles on Cooperative Work

This paper enhances the robot position control using force information, which was previously proposed, for collaborative work between two mobile robots having force sensors to respond to sudden changes in the position of each mobile robot owing to obstacles such as holes and stones. When the mobile robots carry an object together while moving on uneven ground, the object may be broken by too large force applied to it if the difference in the position between the two robots becomes large. The enhanced control tries to adjust the positions quickly to reduce the force by absorbing the difference based on force sensed by the force sensors. In our experiment, the paper demonstrates that the control largely mitigates influences of obstacles on cooperative work by emulating mobile robots in our remote robot systems with force feedback.