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Tether monitoring for entanglement detection, disentanglement and localisation of autonomous robots

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2014

Vishnu Arun Kumar Thumatty Rajan ,
Arjun Nagendran ,
Abbas Dehghani-Sanij  and
Robert C. Richardson
Vishnu Arun Kumar Thumatty Rajan*
Affiliation:
European Commission (EUROSTAT), Luxembourg, Sweden
Arjun Nagendran
Affiliation:
Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA: E-mail: arjun@cs.ucf.edu
Abbas Dehghani-Sanij
Affiliation:
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK E-mail: a.dehghani@leeds.ac.uk, R.C.Richardson@leeds.ac.uk
Robert C. Richardson
Affiliation:
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK E-mail: a.dehghani@leeds.ac.uk, R.C.Richardson@leeds.ac.uk
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: trvishnuarunkumar@yahoo.com
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Summary

Tethered mobile robots are ideal for electrically noisy environments and for time-consuming tasks that require robust data communication and uninterrupted power delivery. However, tethers may become entangled in cluttered environments, leading to immobilisation and consequent mission failure. This work addresses real-time monitoring of tethers to detect tether entanglement, perform disentanglement through tether following and localise within line of sight. Experimental hardware is proposed to implement the tether monitoring techniques. Experiments are performed for single and dual mobile robots to search a target environment and entanglement detection is shown to be successful using quantitative metrics such as mean localization error.

Keywords

Tethered robotsRobot localisationEntanglement detectionCatenary curvesMulti-robot systems
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , March 2016 , pp. 527 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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