Mapless, Stabilizing, and Anti-Stuck Flipper Control for Articulated Tracked Robots

Key points

• Nearly every autonomous or semi-autonomous flipper controller assumes access to an elevation map of the terrain under and in front of the robot.1
• The terrain beneath the chassis is occluded in the sensors, so the map is remembered through odometry integration, whose drift corrupts it.1
• We deploy SAS on a tracked robot with four flippers and evaluate it against manual teleoperation and prior flipper controllers in a large comparison, both in simulation and on a real obstacle.1
• On a log hidden in tall grass, invisible to the LiDAR, the best map-based controller gets stuck while SAS traverses the hidden obstacle without a problem.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Mapless, Stabilizing, and Anti-Stuck Flipper Control for Articulated Tracked Robots
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 9, 04:48 PM

  We present Stabilizing Anti-Stuck (SAS), a mapless controller that combines a stabilization term for body roll and pitch with an anti-stuck term that frees the robot when it gets stuck.

  Nearly every autonomous or semi-autonomous flipper controller assumes access to an elevation map of the terrain under and in front of the robot.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.