Anti-collision Static Rotation Local Planner for Four Independent Steering Drive Self-reconfigurable Robot

Abstract

Pavement cleaning is a labor-intensive, repetitive task and can be automated. Several autonomous pavement cleaning robots have been developed, pushing research towards their design and autonomous capabilities. Advances in design have been reported in earlier works on a self-reconfigurable robot with four independent steering drive (4ISD) capabilities, Panthera, for pavement cleaning and maintenance. Moreover, autonomous navigation requires sharp turns, heading angle adjustments, sideways movement, and locomotion without col-lision through constrained pavement conditions. The present work proposes an algorithm to ingeniously select the instan-taneous center of rotation (ICR) within the self-reconfigurable robot footprint and perform static rotation to adjust its heading angle during the waypoint navigation while avoiding collision with the constrained environment. Finally, the proposed algorithm is implemented, and experiments are conducted in real-world pavement scenarios. The experimental outcome success-fully demonstrates the self-reconfigurable robot's capability to navigate constrained pavement scenarios using the proposed algorithm during autonomous cleaning and maintenance tasks.