Generic Real-Time Motion Controller for Differential Mobile Robots

João Monteiro and Rui Rocha

Aleksandar D. Rodic (editor), Robotics, Contemporary Robotics, Challenges and Solutions, In-Tech Education and Publishing, ISBN 978-9-53307-038-4 (hardcover), ISBN 978-9-53761-939-8 (ebook), pages 163-186, Dec. 2009.

Abstract

Trajectory planning and execution are well known tasks to be performed by mobile robots. Its importance aroused in the past from the need to replace humans when performing either complex or dangerous tasks, mainly in industrial environments. Nowadays, the capabilities and applications of mobile robots are far more generic; Complex tasks pose more demanding control requirements within trajectory execution, including high responsiveness and predictability. Robot soccer might be used as a testbed to enact most of these requirements on an amusing environment and evaluate solutions to important robotic problems such as control, perception, intelligent systems, etc. Therefore, the RAC robotic soccer team has been used to study and validate the motion controller described within this chapter. The control project consists of two main parts: 1) the digital controller, and 2) the real-time system. This latter provides high responsiveness to the previous, resulting in a high-performance implementation of the projected algorithm. Besides addressing the control issue, this chapter also describes a real-time system to complement the developed control module, so that it is able to fulfill pre-defined timing constraints. A considerable number of approaches evidence the need of integrating a real-time system in robot control. Also, the sensory fusion technique using a Kalman filter will be addressed in detail due to its importance. The modularity of the described system provides easy integration with higher level software modules for intelligent perception and robot actuation.

Index Terms — Motion control, Lyapunov functions, real-time control, differential mobile robot, robot soccer.

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BibTeX

@INCOLLECTION(Monteiro_et_Rocha_09,

AUTHOR = "Monteiro, J. and Rocha, R",

TITLE = "Generic Real-Time Motion Controller for Differential Mobile Robots",

BOOKTITLE = "Robotics, Contemporary Robotics, Challenges and Solutions",

PUBLISHER = "In-Tech Education and Publishing",

YEAR = "2009",

MONTH = "Dec.",

EDITOR = "Aleksandar D. Rodic",

PAGES = "163-186"

)

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Last update: 30/03/2010