Tether monitoring for entanglement detection, disentanglement and localisation of autonomous robots. Issue 3 (3rd July 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Rajan, Vishnu Arun Kumar Thumatty; Nagendran, Arjun; Dehghani-Sanij, Abbas; Richardson, Robert C.
• Is Part Of: Robotica. Volume 34:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 527
• Page End: 548
• Publication Date: 2014-07-03
• Subjects: Tethered robots, -- Robot localisation, -- Entanglement detection, -- Catenary curves, -- Multi-robot systems; Robots -- Periodicals; 629.89205
• DOI: 10.1017/S0263574714001623
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0263-5747

Abstract

SUMMARY: Tethered mobile robots are ideal for electrically noisy environments and for time-consuming tasks that require robust data communication and uninterrupted power delivery. However, tethers may become entangled in cluttered environments, leading to immobilisation and consequent mission failure. This work addresses real-time monitoring of tethers to detect tether entanglement, perform disentanglement through tether following and localise within line of sight. Experimental hardware is proposed to implement the tether monitoring techniques. Experiments are performed for single and dual mobile robots to search a target environment and entanglement detection is shown to be successful using quantitative metrics such as mean localization error.