Intelligent Response to Bump in an Autonomous Wheeled Robot

Bump can be a means that a mobile robot communicates with the environment. When a robot is knocked by moving object or pat by a person, it should make response to it. The paper introduces a method to perceive bumps by detecting the vibration caused by it with a 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. Different means of bump may cause different vibration signal, the robot can judge the property of a bump by intensity and vibration way and make a response corresponding to the bump direction and intensity. Different type of bump is studied and the judge rules are also set up. The experiments show that the robot can apperceive stated bump and make a reasonable response