Experimental Study of Kinematic Control of Differential DriveWheeled Mobile Robot

This paper presents experimental results of applied nonlinear trajectory tracking controller for nonholonomic mobile robots utilizing new Microsoftsoftware, namely Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) as a platform for developing robotics applications, for a commercial ROBOSOFT robot named robuLAB10. First, considering the kinematic model of the robot we design a nonlinear controller to solve trajectory tracking problem. Then, we take into account the lateral slip as an unmatched kinematic perturbation and show that under such disturbance the robot is point controllable. Next, using the backstepping approach we design another kinematic controller to face the lateral slip and reject it. The closed-loop stability is proved by using the Lyapunov technique. After that, we introduce the RDS as a simulator, and programming software and also the robot hardware. Using RDS, beside its possibility to simulate the controller in a virtual area on a virtual robot which is similar to the real robot, it lets us download the program, developed in a simulation environment, to the robot without any extra changes. Finally, we apply the first controller to therobot and experimental results show the performance of the controller.

Keywords:

Wheeled Mobile Robots , lateral slip , KinematicController , Backstepping , Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS)