Path following control of a mobile robot

A manipulator attached to an autonomous mobile service robot is being developed to provide a test-bed for research on many topics in this field. The robot, equipped with multiple sensors such as stereo vision, ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors and CCD cameras, is expected to navigate in an indoor or in-building environment automatically and positioning to the desired destination. Two arms mounted on the mobile robot base will be able to manipulate the object coordinately. The whole system is built up hierarchically by 2 sections: the decision-making high level and mobile slave low level. Not using a common velocity controller based driving, this robot base was mounted with a hardware numerical position servo controller which may take great burden from the computer and let it pay much attention to thinking or decision-making intelligently. When working in active mode, the robot base itself can also navigate autonomously without high level. The design objectives, real development and step-motion concept on trajectory control of the mobile robot base are introduced. Three kinds of recursive trajectory control algorithms are proposed and confirmed by experiments. Comparison of their characters is also discussed