Omnibot Umbilical Positioning System

A NASA unmanned mission will place a propellant manufacturing and nuclear facility on the surface of Mars. In the subsequent mission, a space vehicle will land within 1 km of this facility for safety reason. A wheeled mobile robot will be used to make the umbilical connection to the nuclear facility. The mate-in umbilical plate is mounted on a Cartesian manipulator, which is installed on the mobile robot base. The mobile robot is controlled in a teleoperated mode. Operator will use visual feedback and an inertial system to guide the mobile base to get close to the mate-to plate. When in local positioning zone, the control is switched to autonomous mode. The use of proper sensor for the mars environment is verytricky and subject to future research. At this phase of the project, for sake of simplicity ultrasonic sensors are used. The information received from ultrasonic sensors is used to identify the position of mate-to plate and mate the umbilical plates. A successful experimentation verifies the approach.1 The same approach could also be implemented using the laser instead of ultrasonic sensors

Keywords:

Mobile robots , Autonomous , Ultrasonic transducers , Position control