Dead-Reckoning Scheme for Wheeled Mobile Robots Moving on Curved Surfaces

This paper improves the conventional dead reckoning for a wheeled mobile robot moving on curved surfaces. Dead reckoning has been very popularly used for the estimation of mobile robot positions, as it uses a very simple algorithm and is very easy to implement in industrial mobile robots moving on a flat plain. Such mobile robots are being more widely applied for complex industrial tasks, including the inspections and maintenance of oil tanks, ship bodies, power plant components, and so on. Most of this type of equipment is composed of curved surfaces, such as those with cylindrical, spherical, or arbitrary shapes. For the successful accomplishment of such tasks on curved surfaces, the robot has to know its current position and travel on the curved surfaces of the equipment along a pre-specified path. In this paper, the authors propose an extended dead-reckoning scheme for wheeled mobile robots moving on a curved plane, and illustrate a formula with examples for spherical and cylindrical surfaces. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed through a series of simulations and experiments using a magnet-wheeled mobile robot developed in our laboratory.