Fuzzy Parking Manoeuvres of Wheeled Mobile Robots

This work deals with the parking manoeuvres problem for a wheeled mobile robot (WMR). The robot has the same non-holonomic kinematic constraint that has a car vehicle. This constraint makes the robot having its direction always tangent to the trajectory. Two sub-cases of parking problems are considered. These are forward and backward maneuvers, aiming to stabilize the robot at a pre-specified pose. The environment is assumed to be known, obstacle-free and a local map of the area is already done by prior processing the information obtained from ultrasonic sensors mounted on the robot. A linguistic fuzzy model to represent the robot and its environment is developed. From this model, the parking manoeuvres are carried out by mimicking a human car driver using a fuzzy control system. Upon simulation tests this approach has been proved efficient giving very encouraging results.