Vol. 51 No. 1 (2014)   New Products & Technologies
Technical Papers

Development of Obstacle Avoidance Control for Robotic Products Using Potential Method

YUSUKE YASHIRO
KAZUKI EGUCHI
SATOSHI IWASAKI
YOSHIAKI YAMAUCHI
MASAHIRO NAKATA

In the field of robot development used in areas into which human beings have difficulty entering such as deep water, space and irradiated areas, the need for autonomous products that can operate without being remotely control by a human being has increased. Considering application to more general issues, it is important for autonomous operation to have the capability to avoid unknown obstacles in three dimensional space. Accordingly, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) has used the potential method to establish control logic and verified the effectiveness of the logic through simulation. Specifically, the capability to improve the efficiency of avoidance operations in three dimensional space by finding obstacle avoidance paths in horizontal and vertical directions based only on the coordinates of the obstacle was confirmed.