Semi-autonomous control of 6-DOF crawler robot having flippers for getting over unknown-steps

A rescue crawler robot having flipper arm has high ability to get over rough terrain, but it is hard to control its flippers in remote control. The authors aim at development of a semi-autonomous control system for the crawler robot. In the system, moving direction is specified by an operator at remote place. Joypad (Sony PS2 controller) is used as input devise. For increasing its stability and robustness about change of the environment, its flippers are controlled according to sensor informations which can be obtained in real-time. Concretely, the robot recognizes the environment (upward step or downward step) using its physical model, its postural information, flippers' contact and distance between the body and ground, and controls these flippers. In this movie, we show you performance of our proposed control method using "Aladdin".