The stable wheeled locomotion in low speed region for a wheel-legged mobile robot

This paper discusses solution for the singular configuration problem in wheel-legged mobile robot. First, we show the kinematic constraints of wheel-legged mobile robot. We describe the singular configuration problem at the inverse kinematics calculation. Next, we show a method using the redundancy in kinematic constraints to the acceleration level as solution of the singular configuration problem. Furthermore, we describe a new singular configuration problem that occurs in low speed wheeled locomotion. Finally, the damped least squares method is applied to solve the new singular configuration. In addition, we propose a design of a damping factor in the damped least squares method. The effectiveness of the solution is validated by three-dimensional simulation.