Low-cost Selective Steering Structure Design for Counter-steering and In-place Rotation of Smart Farm Robots

In this paper, we propose a mobile robot steering structure that can do counter-steering and rotate in place. There are a lot of car-like robots and differentially driven robots since they are easy to make. But they cause slip when they rotate; especially, differentially driven robots cause greater slip than other models. Also, it cannot even rotate in place on a surface with high friction, like asphalt. To reduce these slips and increase maneuverability, AWS(All-Wheel-Steer) robots with as many motors as the number of wheels have been being chosen. However, with many motors, software and hardware systems are complex and expensive. So, we propose a more simple and inexpensive steering structure with high maneuverability like AWS. This steering structure has a single motor and a solenoid actuator, but it has high enough mobility to do tasks required in the smart farm.