Locomotion of an all-terrain mobile robot

The authors introduce a framework and prospective solutions for intelligent locomotion, defined as the ability for a mobile robot to cross over obstacles along a path roughly determined either through teleoperation or by a navigation path-finder. Then, they present a simple but efficient control scheme derived from these concepts, taking into account ground clearance, vehicle safety, and possible occlusions in the vision field. This control scheme is applied to Rami, a four-tiltable-track robot equipped with force sensors, an inertial reference system, a laser-stripe range finder, and extensive real-time computing facilities based on a decentralized architecture