An Improved Path Following Method for a Piezo-Driven Miniature Robot Based on Temporary Path Planning

This paper studied the path following case of a PZT-driven electromagnetic miniature robot which was used as a locomotion platform in a "Desktop Micro Robots Factory". To avoid the wire wound-up problem of the former method which happened because of an in-situ rotation of the robot, an improved method was proposed based on temporary path planning. The nonlinearity of the locomotive characteristics according to the difference equation describing the position and orientation changes of the robot was introduced, which was then used in the simulation. The proposed generating path was composed of two arcs and a line with directional information, which aimed at a smoothly joining the desired path at some specified point. Together with a conventional fuzzy logic controller, tracking performance was preferred.