Discrete event controller for urban obstacles negotiation with walking robot

Multilegged robots working in urban environment have to cope with obstacles. Some robots avoid them, but there are obstacles which have to be traversed. In the paper a generalized scheme of urban obstacle negotiation process using the Finite State Machine model was presented. In each state the robot performs the movement or gathers the data from sensors. The transitions are made according to events which are external signals depending on the particular set of robot variables. The obtained automaton is generic with respect to the type of the obstacle. The same automaton describes negotiation of curbs, platforms and stairs (in ascent and descent phase). In this article at first the extended automaton is presented. Then the reduced form of the Finite State Machine is described. Next the experiments on simulator and on the real robot are demonstrated. The experimental set-up consists of a robot and an environment with a curb and stairs. The robot was able to negotiate these obstacles using the same automaton.