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This paper presents a fuzzy control system that incorporates sensing, control and planning to improve the performance of the wall-climbing microrobots in unstructured environments. After introduction of the robot system, a task reference method is proposed which is based on a fuzzy multisensor data fusion scheme. The method provides a novel mechanism to efficiently integrate task scheduling, action planning and motion control in a unified framework. A robot gait generation method is described which switches the robot locomotion between different motion modes with the help of a finite state machine driven by sensory information. A fuzzy motion controller is designed to improve control performance and reduce power consumption by the suitable selection of fuzzy sets and inference methods, as well as the definition of corresponding membership functions and control rule bases. A fuzzy logic compensator is developed to compensate the gravitational effects according to different robot configurations and task situations. Experimental results prove the validity of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a landmark-based navigation technique for a mobile robot. Robot position estimation is achieved by using a camera and a navigational landmark pattern, which consists of simple geometrical patterns. The Modified Elliptical Hough Transform (MEHT) is developed for detecting and measuring the projection of the landmark in the camera's image space. Robustness of this approach is demonstrated by studying the cases of noisy image data and partial occlusion of the landmark pattern. Error analysis of MEHT is performed to provide more understanding of the effects of applying elliptical approximation to the projection of a circular pattern. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]