Design and Implementation of Control Techniques for Differential Drive Mobile Robots: An RFID Approach

Localization and motion control (navigation) are two major tasks for a successful mobile robot navigation. The motion controller determines the appropriate action for the robot’s actuator based on its current state in an operating environment. A robot recognizes its environment through some sensors and executes physical actions through actuation mechanisms. However, sensory information is noisy and hence actions generated based on this information may be non-deterministic. Therefore, a mobile robot provides actions to its actuators with a certain degree of uncertainty. Moreover, when no prior knowledge of the environment is available, the problem becomes even more difficult, as the robot has to build a map of its surroundings as it moves to determine the position. Skilled navigation of a differential drive mobile robot (DDMR) requires solving these tasks in conjunction, since they are inter-dependent. Having resolved these tasks, mobile robots can be employed in many contexts in indoor and outdoor environments such as delivering payloads in a dynamic environment, building safety, security, building measurement, research, and driving on highways. This dissertation exploits the use of the emerging Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology for the design and implementation of cost-effective and modular control techniques for navigating a mobile robot in an indoor environment. A successful realization of this process has been addressed with three separate navigation modules. The first module is devoted to the development of an indoor navigation system with a customized RFID reader. This navigation system is mainly pioneered by mounting a multiple antenna RFID reader on the robot and placing the RFID tags in three dimensional workspace, where the tags’ orthogonal position on the ground define the desired positions that the robot is supposed to reach. The robot generates control actions based on the information provided by the RFID reader for it to navigate those pre-defined points. On the contrary, the second and third navigation modules employ custom-made RFID