An experimental mobile robot platform for the study of dynamic effects and high speed control

In this article a wheeled mobile robot system is presented, designed for the investigation of vehicle properties at dynamic maneuvering. The proposed solution comprises two different aspects: the mechanical design and a system-on-chip control system. As many other differentially steered mobile robots, the vehicle has two coaxial driving wheels and a passive castor wheel. This freely moving unconstrained wheel is equipped with additional rotary encoders, while the wheel angular speeds are accurately determined by a hardware timer based measurement. Thus, improved vehicle speed estimation is achieved, including the detection and quantification of possible slip on the actuated wheels. These measurements are sufficiently accurate to derive of a simple case specific empirical tire model, based only on odometry data.