Wheeled mobile robots are increasingly present in industrial and service robotics, requiring adequate solutions for the motion control problem. With reference to the unicycle kinematics, several control strategies for trajectory tracking and posture stabilization are reviewed and compared on simulation and experimental level. Experiments are reported for BellyBot, a two-wheel differentially-dri...

The dynamic model of redundantly actuated mobile robots with powered caster wheels is derived based on vehicle dynamics. The contact stability problem of wheeled mobile robots is introduced and stable contact condition that characterizes the bounds of contact stability is derived. Sliding mode observer is proposed to estimate the robot velocity using wheel angular velocity and joint torque info...

This article presents a Java based 3D simulator for mobile robots called MoRoS3D. This application is able to simulate realistic motion of different wheeled mobile robots including dynamic behavior and collision detection. Typical sensors are also available in order to develop intelligent navigation applications. As this simulator provides CORBA interfaces for every active objects, applications...

This paper studies distributed rendezvous strategies for multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots with the aim of testing their practicality on real robots. We investigate control strategies which use just bearing-only or range-only measurements and do not need inter-robot radio communication to share the measurements. For the bearing-only case, two control laws proposed in our previous stud...

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...

The subject of this chapter is the motion control problem of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs). With reference to the unicycle kinematics, we review and compare several control strategies for trajectory tracking and posture stabilization in an environment free of obstacles. Experiments are reported for SuperMARIO, a two-wheel differentially-driven mobile robot. From the comparison of the obtained re...

This paper presents the velocity kinematic modeling of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) by applying the matrix coordinate transformation to every pairs of WMRs including wheeled pairs which were dealt with ad-hoc manners in the previous methodologies. A wheeled pair is not replaced with a planar pair and its kinematics is formulated together with those of lower pairs, even though there exists 2 DOF...

We address the potential for continuous “continuum” robot elements to transform the nature of robotic traversal of uneven terrain. Continuum robots are “dual” to traditional robot structures, with their inherent capabilities featuring strengths in areas that are key weaknesses for conventional robots. These capabilities match well to current challenges in robot mobility, particularly in unstruc...