Revista de informática y biología de sistemas

Development of Omnidirectional Collision-Detecting Bumper Using Noncontact Sensors

Abstract

Noriyuki Shimpuku and Hiroyuki Miyamoto

The omnidirectional mobile mechanism has high movement performance. We developed a prototype omnidirectional collision-detecting bumper using potentiometers for such a mobile mechanism. However, the previous prototype had low durability because it used contact-type sensors and a link mechanism to convert from the displacement of the bumper to the rotation of the potentiometers. In this paper, we propose a new prototype omnidirectional collision-detecting bumper using noncontact-type sensors. In an experiment, the new prototype showed higher accuracy than the previous one.