Tractor–trailer systems have been widely used to increase load transportation capacity. Control of these systems started from motion aid facilities in human-driven vehicles to fully autonomous mobile robots in recent years. In fact, tractor– trailer wheeled robot has been proposed as a modular robotic system in which an actuated mobile robot tows a passive trailer. This is a highly nonlinear un...

There are many examples of mechanical systems which require rolling contacts between two or more rigid bodies. Rolling contacts engender nonholonomic constraints in an otherwise holonomic system. In this paper, we develop a unified approach to the control of mechanical systems subject to both holonomic and nonholonomic constraints. We first present a state space realization of a constrained sys...

In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In this first one we present the mathematical foundation of our framework. The motion of a mobile robot that transports a human should be comfortable and customizable. We identify several properties t...

In this paper, we focus on the development of a quantitative performance analysis framework for a cooperative system of multiple wheeled mobile manipulators physically transporting a common payload. Each mobile manipulator module consists of a differentially driven wheeled mobile robot (WMR) with a mounted planar three-degree-offreedom (DOF) revolute-jointed manipulator. A composite cooperative...

We develop tools for studying the control of underactuated mechanical systems that evolve on a configuration space with a principal fiber bundle structure. Taking the viewpoint of affine connection control systems, we derive reduced formulations of the Levi-Civita and the nonholonomic affine connections, along with the symmetric product, in the presence of symmetries and nonholonomic constraint...

In this paper we develop an analytical set of equations to describe the motion of discrete dynamical systems subjected to holonomic and/or nonholonomic Pfaffian equality constraints. These equations are obtained by using Gauss's Principle to recast the problem of the constrained motion of dynamical systems in the form of a quadratic programming problem. The closed-form solution to this programm...

Teleoperation based space systems have received much attention in the past years.This paper reports the construction and the remote control of a nonholonomic robotic system. The system consists of a three-wheeled mobile platform to keep the robot stable and a 6-DOF articulate manipulator on top of the platform. First, we explain how its design and work, then the kinematic model of the robotic p...

An integrated visual-based approach to motion planning and control of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot is presented. Vision is used to localize the obstacles and the robot and for real-time feedback control of the vehicle motion. An A∗based motion planner is used to search the discretized robot configuration space for collisionfree paths. Nonholonomic constraints are taken into account by pr...

This paper describes a prototype and analytical studies of a spherical rolling robot, a new design of a nonholonomic system. The spherical robot is driven by two remotely controlled, internally mounted rotors that induce the ball to roll and spin on a fiat surface. It is tracked on the plane by an overhead camera. A mathematical model of the robot's motion was developed using the nonholonomic c...