Development of a Mobile Two-Wheel Balancing Platform for Autonomous Applications

This paper describes the development of a mobile two-wheel balancing platform to facilitate the testing of autonomous mobile applications. Two-wheeled platforms offer the benefits of increased stability for tall robots with a smaller footprint, resulting in greater agility. The integration of software and hardware is an important aspect of the design, as well as the implementation of reference trajectory controllers. Sensors to measure the speed, tilt angle and tilt rate of the platform are incorporated with two embedded PCs. The first PC provides control commands to the system based on MATLAB and Simulink and the second PC is responsible for implementing advanced autonomous applications such as people following and obstacle avoidance using ´Player´, a well known robot software interface used for robotics research. The LQR controller is tuned to yield better closed-loop performance and tested with the platform.