Exploiting wheel slips of mobile robots to improve navigation performance

• Main Authors: Sidek, Shahrul Naim, Sarkar, Nilanjan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Robotic Society of japan 2013
• Subjects: TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/30421/1/Exploiting_Wheel_Slips.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/30421/; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01691864.2013.763752

Improving navigation performance of autonomous wheeled mobile robot (WMR) in a dynamic unstructured environment requires improved maneuverability. In such cases, the dynamics of wheel slip may violate the ideal no-slip kinematic constraints generally used to model nonholonomic WMR. In this paper, a new method is proposed to tackle the modeling inadequacy that arises when slip is neglected by including both longitudinal and lateral slip dynamics into the overall dynamics of the WMR. This new model of the WMR provides a realistic simulation environment that can be utilized to develop model-based controllers to improve WMR navigation. In this paper, a dynamic planner with a path-following controller is designed to allow the WMR to navigate efficiently by autonomously regulating the generated traction force due to wheel slip. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the importance of the proposed modeling technique to capture slip phenomenon and the efficacy of the presented control technique to exploit such slip for better navigation performance.