Experiments on orientation recovery and steering of an autonomous mobile robot using encoded magnetic compass disc

This paper describes the experiments on orientation recovery and steering of an autonomous mobile robot which uses an encoded magnetic compass disc as an orientation sensor. The mobile robot developed for experiments in this work is highly cost-effective and has two independent position-sensing systems. The one is an odometric sensor installed on the passive castor wheel, and the other consists of an optical incremental shaft encoder using magnetic compass disc. The experiments have been performed on two cases: (1) line path tracking test in a slippery environment and (2) orientation steering test in a circular path. Experimental results show that, while line path tracking in a slippery environment, the orientation of the mobile robot is recovered successfully with an acceptable position shift after two-time recovery action. For the circular path test case, the strayed angle after 90/spl deg/ orientation steering is only about 0.30/spl deg/. It is shown that the system designed is simple and applicable to mobile robot navigation.