A power-assistant platform taking environmental disturbance into account

This paper proposes a power-assistant platform which is a mobile robot driven by two different wheels. It has also two casters, and an operation handle to apply pushing and pulling force to the robot. The applied force is detected by two force sensors mounted on the handling bar. Then the detected force is utilized to determine the driving torque of the robot. This makes it possible to control the robot motion by an operator independently of the weight of loaded objects. Furthermore, this paper deals with a compensation of environmental disturbance to realize a smooth operational motion of the robot. Several experimental results are shown to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.