Design and simulation of control systems for a field survey mobile robot platform

• Main Authors: Shamshiri, Ramin, Wan Ismail, Wan Ishak, Mohd Kassim, Muhamad Saufi
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia 2012
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/50712/1/_TechnicalPapers_CAFEi2012_230.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/50712/; http://cafei.upm.edu.my/download.php?filename=/TechnicalPapers/CAFEi2012_230.pdf

Agricultural mobile robots involve automatic and accurate control of different moving parts such as wheel speed and steering. The design challenges of a control system in this regard are the response overshoot, shorter settling time and smaller steady state error. Three controllers, including lead-lag compensator, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and fuzzy logic controller were designed and simulated in this study to control the angular rate of the shaft of a DC motor actuator for a field survey mobile robot that moves between plants rows to perform image acquisition task through a digital camera mounted on a two link arm attached on the robot base. The response of the actuator model for each controller were determined and compared for a sinusoidal and a step input that simulated robot speed and positioning references respectively. Performance analysis showed the effectiveness of the PID and lead-lag compensator response for the wheel steering task, while the fuzzy logic controller design had a better performance in wheel speed control. The output of this analysis was a proved satisfaction of the proposed design criteria which results enhanced mobility of the robot in terms of fast response, speed control accuracy and smooth steering at row-end turnings.