Design and Steering Control of a Center-Articulated Mobile Robot Module.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Robotics Volume 2011, Article ID 621879, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2011/621879 Research Article Design and Steering Control of a Center-Articulated Mobile Robot Module Mehdi Delrobaei and Kenneth A. McIsaac Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 5B9 Correspondence should be addressed to Mehdi Delrobaei, mehdidelrobaei@ Received 3 July 2011; Accepted 3 November 2011 Academic Editor: Yangmin Li Copyright © 2011 M. Delrobaei and K. A. McIsaac. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper discusses the design and steering control for an autonomous modular mobile robot. The module is designed with a center-articulated steering joint to minimize the number of actuators used in the chain. We propose a feedback control law which allows steering between configurations in the plane and show its application as a parking control to dock modules together. The control law is designed by Lyapunov techniques and relies on the equations of the robot in polar coordinates. A set of experiments have been carried out to show the performance of the proposed approach. The design is intended to endow individual wheeled modules with the capability to merge and make a single snake-like robot to take advantage of the benefits of modular robotics. 1. Motivation This contrast motivated us to study the transition between wheeled and modular robotics and prese