Comparing control strategies for autonomous line-tracking robots

Autonomous mobile robotics is a very exciting area for students particularly for those who attend courses on electronics. The authors have been involved in several activities in this area together with students of the University of Aveiro. In particular, one of such activities is to build robots to follow a line drawn on the floor. In order to do this efficiently a simulator has been implemented and used to test the influence of different control approaches. This article presents a brief description of the MATLAB-based robot model and line-tracking simulator. It then compares several different control approaches in terms of resulting integral absolute error (IAE) and integral squared error (ISE), easiness of tuning and complexity of the respective code. The compared approaches are: proportional, proportional-derivative, proportional-integral-derivative, fuzzy, table-based fuzzy, self-organising fuzzy and neural-net inverse model based