Abstract
Researches on mobile robots have been mainly focused on the autonomous navigation and a lot of interesting results have been published so far. Most of applications are, however, fancy, unpractical, and very expensive to be used for 'UN-expensive' purpose. Well-known soccer robot may be an example of unpractical application. Un-autonomous mobile robot has, however, potential for a lot of practical applications. Especially, tele-operation of the un-autonomous mobile robot may the central issue of research. Major research topics for the tele-operated un-autonomous mobile robot include development of a force reflecting joystick for tele-operation and development of a sophisticated algorithm for smooth tele-operation. A new concept named fuzzy command smoothing algorithm is proposed in this paper in order to provide smooth motion to a tele-operated mobile robot. It gives smooth motion command to the mobile robot from possibly abrupt quick turn motion command of the joystick using fuzzy logic. Simulation results verify the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.