This paper proposes an optimal posture for the task-oriented movement of dual arm manipulator. A stability criterion function which consists of three kinds of feature-representative parameters has been utilized to define the optimal posture. The first parameter is the force which is applied to the object. The torque of each joint and position of arm are attained from the current sensor and encoder, respectively. From these two data, the applied force to an object is estimated using sum of vectors of the joint torques estimated from the measured current. In order to investigate the robustness of each posture, the variation of the end-effector from the encoder information has been utilized as the second parameter. And for the last parameter for the optimality, the total energy consumption has been used. The total consuming energy of each posture can be computed from the current information and the battery voltage. The proposed robot structure consists of a mobile inverted pendulum and dual manipulators. In order to define the optimal posture for the each object, external disturbances are applied to the mobile inverted pendulum robot and the first and second parameters are investigated to find the optimal posture among the pre-selected most representative postures. Finally, the proposed optimal posture has been verified by the proposed stability criterion function which consists of total force to the object, the fluctuation of the end-effector position, and total energy consumption. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms has been verified and demonstrated through the practical simulations and real experiments.

This paper aims to add the autonomous driving capability to the inverted pendulum system which maintains the inverted pendulum upright stably. For the autonomous driving from the starting position to the goal position, the motion control algorithm is proposed based on the dynamics of the inverted pendulum robot. To derive the dynamic model of the inverted pendulum robot, a three dimensional robot coordinate is defined and the velocity jacobian is newly derived. With the analysis of the wheel rolling motion, the dynamics of inverted pendulum robot are derived and used for the motion control algorithm. To maintain the balance of the inverted pendulum, the autonomous driving strategy is derived step by step considering the acceleration, constant velocity and deceleration states simultaneously. The driving experiments of inverted pendulum robot are performed while maintaining the balance of the inverted pendulum. For reading the positions of the inverted pendulum and wheels, only the encoders are utilized to make the system cheap and reliable. Even though the derived dynamics works for the slanted surface, the experiments are carried out in the standardized flat ground using the inverted pendulum robot in this paper. The experimental data for the wheel rolling and inverted pendulum motions are demonstrated for the straight line motion from a start position to the goal position.