Simultaneous Motion-Slosh Control for a Self-Reconfigurable Mobile Robot

Abstract

Research on cleaning automation is getting a lot of attention recently, due to the pandemic. This work discusses the use of a self-re-configurable mobile robot named h-Trihex for floor cleaning tasks. As the task involves carrying liquid detergents with the robot, the translation and rotation of the robot give rise to sloshing. The cleaning operation also requires the robot to move along a specific path to swiftly cover the whole area. The trajectory tracking as well as the cleaning performance may suffer due to the undesired sloshing effects. We propose a new robust controller design which can simultaneously achieve tracking performance and sloshing suppression for the h-Trihex robot. The simulation results verify the usability of the proposed design.