Purpose
Excellent obstacle surmounting performance is essential for the robotic vehicles in uneven terrain. However, existing robotic vehicles depend on complex mechanisms or control algorithms to surmount an obstacle. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a new simple configuration of an all-terrain robotic vehicle with eight wheels including four-swing arms.
Design/methodology/approach
This vehicle is driven by distributed hydraulic motors which provide high mobility. It possesses the ability to change the posture by means of cooperation of the four-swing arms. This ensures that the vehicle can adapt to complex terrain. In this paper, the bionic mechanism, control design and steering method of the vehicle are introduced. Then, the kinematic model of the center of gravity is studied. Afterward, the obstacle surmounting performance based on a static model is analyzed. Finally, the simulation based on ADAMS and the prototype experiment is carried out.
Findings
The experiment results demonstrate that the robotic vehicle can surmount an obstacle 2.29 times the height of the wheel radius, which verifies the feasibility of this new configuration. Therefore, this vehicle has excellent uneven terrain adaptability.
Originality/value
This paper proposes a new configuration of an all-terrain robotic vehicle with four-swing arms. With simple mechanism and control algorithms, the vehicle has a high efficiency of surmounting an obstacle. It can surmount a vertical obstacle 2.29 times the height of the wheel radius.
Purpose
Nowadays, the global agricultural system is highly dependent on the widespread use of synthetic pesticides to control diseases, weeds and insects. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is deployed as a major part of integrated pest management in a precision agriculture system for accurately and cost-effectively distributing pesticides to resist crop diseases and insect pests.
Design/methodology/approach
With multimodal sensor fusion applying adaptive cubature Kalman filter, the position and velocity are enhanced for the correction and accuracy. A dynamic movement primitive is combined with the Gaussian mixture model to obtain numerous trajectories through the teaching of a demonstration. Further, to enhance the trajectory tracking accuracy under an uncertain environment of the spraying, a novel model reference adaptive sliding mode control approach is proposed for motion control.
Findings
Experimental studies have been carried out to test the ability of the proposed interface for the pesticides in the crop fields. The effectiveness of the proposed interface has been demonstrated by the experimental results.
Originality/value
To solve the path planning problem of a complex unstructured environment, a human-robot skills transfer interface is introduced for the UAV that is instructed to follow a trajectory demonstrated by a human teacher.
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