Perception of Bump and Making a Response in an Autonomous Wheeled Mobile Robot

Although mobile robots are installed sensors to detect the environment, it is still hard to avoid bump. On the other hand, a bump with the robot can be taken as a way to communicate with it, so it is necessary for the robot to perceive bumps and make a reasonable responds to it. The paper introduces a method to sense a bump by detecting the vibration caused by it with a 2-D (two-dimensional) accelerometer fixed in a differential drive wheeled mobile robot. The vibration signals are converted to force signal, and a rule is set up to determine the bump direction angle according to the feature of vibration force. Since it is not easy to obtain the exact bump angle for all kinds of interferences, a responding policy is designed to make the robot react according to the region where the bump occurs. The experiments show that the robot can effectively detect the bump in a reasonable error range, and it can successfully find out the object that hit the robot in most cases