Work in simultaneous localisation and map-building (“SLAM”) for mobile robots has focused on the simplified case in which a robot is considered to move in two dimensions on a ground plane. While this is often a good approximation, a large number of real-world applications require robots to move around terrain which has significant slopes and undulations, and it is desirable that these robots to...

The promise of legged robots over standard wheeled robots is to provide improved mobility over rough terrain. This promise builds on the decoupling between the environment and the main body of the robot that the presence of articulated legs allows, with two consequences. First, the motion of the main body of the robot can be made largely independent from the roughness of the terrain, within the...

Even though the market size is still small at this moment, applications of robots are gradually spreading out from the manufacturing industrial environment to face other important challenges, like the support of an aging society and to educate the new generations. The development of human-friendly robots drives research that aims at autonomous or semi-autonomous robots that are natural and intu...

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...

This research presents a nonlinear adaptive fuzzy control method as an analytical design and simple structure for the trajectory tracking problem in wheeled mobile robots with skew symmetrical property. For this robots, it is not easy to find solution due complicated error dynamics between controlled desired trajectories. deriving law of problem, filter link firstly adopted solvable dynamics, t...

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...