Skid-steered, tracked, tele-operated robots are used to perform high-risk critical missions such as bomb disposal under conditions deemed too risky to send a human. Often the robots carry heavy payloads that raise their centers of mass, increasing the risk of tip-over. Since it is often not feasible to send a human to right a toppled robot, tip-over is equivalent to mission failure. Hence, an autonomous behavior to prevent robot tip-over is desired. In this research, a simplified model of mobile robot dynamics permits separation of pitch and roll stabilization. Adaptive control is used to stabilize the appropriate angle based on the normalized tip-over measure. Experimental validation of this control is successfully demonstrated on an iRobot Packbot and a Segway RMP 440.

Recently, we have shown the emergence of oscillatory behaviour in unforced bistable systems having dynamics of the general form: tx equiv partU(x,t)/partx, subject to carefully crafted coupling schemes. Here, we present experimental results obtained on a physical system implemented with N=3 coupled ferromagnetic cores; the oscillatory behaviour is triggered when the coupling constant exceeds a threshold value, and, more importantly, the oscillation characteristics are sensitive to weak external dc magnetic fields. The oscillations afford then a novel detection scheme for fluxgate magnetometer. In this paper, we introduce another idea; using the coupled core fluxgate, in the detection of time-periodic fields of very low frequency. In this case measurements can be realized in a "power-saver" mode wherein the coupled setup can be, initially, subthreshold (i.e. non-oscillating) and be triggered into oscillation by the advent of the target (oscillatory) field. Preliminary experiments of this novel operation mode are here presented