Cooperative behavior of a wheeled inverted pendulum for object transportation

Abstract

Cooperative transportation of an object by two or more mobile robots requires each robot to exert an appropriate force to support and move the object, to move along the object, and to maintain its attitude. A mechanically unstable robot, such as a wheeled inverted pendulum, needs to control the force and follow the object as standing stably against the force in an integrated manner. We call this a cooperative behavior. To realize this behavior of a wheeled inverted pendulum, we built control systems to estimate the external force and maintain standing and to exert a specified force. We applied them to a wheeled inverted pendulum. Experiments were conducted of cooperative transportation between a human and the robot. In the future, we aim to realize cooperative transportation by two wheeled inverted pendulums using the control systems.