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...

Articulated Wheeled Robotic (AWR) locomotion systems consist of chassis connected to a set of wheels through articulated linkages. Such articulated “leg-wheel systems” facilitate reconfigurability that has significant applications in many arenas, but also engender constraints that make the design, analysis and control difficult. We will study this class of systems in the context of design, anal...

This paper presents the intelligent wheeled mobile robot motion control in unstructured environments. The fuzzy control of a wheeled mobile robot motion in unstructured environments with obstacles and slopes is proposed. Outputs of the fuzzy controller are the angular speed difference between the left and right wheels of the mobile robot and the mobile robot velocity. The simulation results sho...

Obstacle avoidance is an essential function for the navigation of mobile robots. Noise filtering improves the measurement accuracy of senors and plays an important role for obstacle avoidance in the applications of mobile robots. This study evaluates the performance of the extended Kalman filtering (EKF) and Kalman filtering (KF) for obstacle avoidance of a two-wheeled mobile robot. EKF is an a...

This paper describes a novel procedure based on Core Path Graphs to generate continuously differentiable sub-optimal paths for wheeled mobile robots in the presence of obstacles. The operational scenario is first discretized with a finite dimensional grid of positions-directions pairs. A weighted and oriented graph is then defined whose nodes are the above mentioned grid points, and whose arcs ...

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheele...

The accurate model-based servo-control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) relies upon the formulation of realistic kinematic and dynamic models. We* identify six special WMR characteristics (closed-chains, hig her-pair joints, unactuated and unsensed joints, friction, and pulse-width modulation) that require methodologies for modeling and control beyond those conventionally applied to stationary m...