Design and implementation of the low-level control system of an All-Terrain Mobile Robot

This paper presents a first step towards the design and development of the control system of an All-Terrain Mobile Robot. Different requirements are taken into account with the aim of setting up an experimental test-bed to support research on autonomous vehicles and on electronic devices to enhance the safety in presence of human riders. Since the vehicle should remain drivable, both the design of the hw/sw architecture and the choice of a proper perception and actuation system are particularly critical. The selected perception and actuation system is described here, pointing out the choices that were made in order to satisfy those requirements. The description of the steering and the throttle control systems together with the choice of the control laws are presented. Finally, the tuning of such control laws and some experimental results are reported in order to show the possibility to perform manoeuvres with the same dynamics of a human rider.