Damping Control of Liquid Container by Swing-type Active Vibration Reducer on Mobile Robot

This paper proposes a damping control of sloshing in a cylindrical container with a swing-type active vibration reducer on a wheeled mobile robot (WMR). The WMR runs along a straight path on a horizontal plane. The container is mounted on the active vibration reducer. A laser displacement sensor is used to observe the liquid level in the container. The container can be tilted in the running direction by the active vibration reducer. A sloshing model is obtained from a spherical pendulum-type sloshing model, which approximately expresses (1, 1)-mode sloshing. The sloshing model is used to design a damping control system. The control system of the active vibration reducer is designed with an inverse model of sloshing and an optimal regulator with a Kalman filter. The WMR is driven by an acceleration pattern designed with an input shaping method. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation and experimental results.