A wheeled mobile robot is here modelled as a planar rigid body that rides on an arbitrary number of wheels. The relationship between the rigid body motion of the robot and the steering and drive rates of wheels is developed. In particular, conditions are obtained that guarantee that rolling without skidding or sliding can occur. Explicit differential equations are derived to describe the rigid ...

This paper addresses the measurement of motion expressiveness in wheeled mobile robots. A neural network based supervised learning strategy is proposed as a method to fuse information obtained from the measurement of selected features. The choice of these features is made to reflect the visual quality of the trajectory and hence carries semantic ambiguities that are filtered out through the abi...

In this work, we consider a group of differential-wheeled robots endowed with noisy relative positioning capabilities. We develop a decentralized approach based on a receding horizon controller to generate, in real-time, trajectories that guarantee the convergence of our robots to a common location (i.e. rendezvous). Our receding horizon controller is tailored around two numerical optimization ...

We present a control framework for achieving encirclement of a target moving in 3D using a multi-robot system. Three variations of a basic control strategy are proposed for different versions of the encirclement problem, and their effectiveness is formally established. An extension ensuring maintenance of a safe inter-robot distance is also discussed. The proposed framework is fully decentraliz...

The area of collective and cooperative behaviour in swarm robots is an exciting field of study. Recent technological and economic developments have made it possible to build medium to large scale swarms of quite sophisticated mobile robots. We review recent mobile computing technologies and describe our architecture for a swarm of tri-wheeled robots that can exchange information via wireless ar...

Wheeled Mobile Robots are considered as the most widely used class of Mobile Robots. This is due to their fast maneuvering, simple controllers, and energy saving characteristics. A new adaptive algorithm for tracking control of these robots is presented in this paper which is robust against external and internal disturbances. A combination of model reference adaptive control and gain scheduling...

In swarm robotics, the agents are often assumed to be identical. In this paper, we argue that the cooperation between swarms of different kinds of robots can enhance the capabilities of the robotic system — heterogeneous swarms marry the robustness and parallelism of homogeneous swarms with efficient task specialisation. A key problem of heterogeneous swarm systems is the potential complexity o...

A modular wheeled mobile robot is composed of autonomous wheeled modules capable of selfassembling to form up a modular mobile robot. The robot can change the number of its modules by having the modules detach themselves from the main body and move independently. In this paper, we propose a docking system for such robots, including a connection mechanism and a docking guidance system. The conne...

In this paper, path planning of wheeled mobile robots is investigated in presence of environmental obstacles based on potential field method. To do this, nonlinear dynamic equations of the mobile robot are derived with the respect of its nonholonomic constraints. To avoid the obstacles during the robot’s motion, repulsive potential functions are used. By implementation of potential field method...

Legged robots have superior terrain adaptability comparing to traditional wheeled vehicles. They also offer attractive capabilities in terms of agility and obstacle avoidance. On the other hand, traditional wheeled platforms provide sufficient robustness, mechanical simplicity and energetic performance. They are fast, powerful in terms of load to weight ratio, stable, and easy to control. Hybri...