Development of an articulated mine-detecting manipulator system for mobile robots

This paper presents a servo motor selection technique for a mobile mine detection system which is operated in the field condition. As a first step, mine detection sensor should follow the earth profile while maintaining a constant distance to the earth surface. In order to acquire a reasonable manipulator trajectory and its required torque, a kind of modeling technique is devised to remove the unwanted fluctuations in the earth data. Then, Straete et al.'s normalization method is adopted and is improved to select the adequate actuator for each joint of manipulator. The improvements are as follows: First, an equivalent output power lines are plotted at the same load curve, which gives another selection criterion. Second, a temperature based criterion is proposed for the continuous limit, which estimates the steady state winding temperature of a motor, and can be used to determine a suitable motor and gear ratio. This formulation gives not only the selection of a motor and gear ratio, but also gives the estimated operating temperature. Finally, realized system is verified through the basic performance test.