Modeling and Control of Differential-Drive Chassis for a Homecare Assistive Robot

With the increasing of the aging population, the demand for homecare services is escalating and the homecare assistive robots are becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, a differential mobile chassis design for a homecare assistive robot is presented. The mobile chassis is made of aluminum sheet and profile, and adopts a two-wheel differential model as the kinematic model. The STM32 single chip microcomputer is used as the cerebellum to control chassis movement, and the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit is employed as the brain for perception and decision-making. The software architecture is based on the back-fore ground system and the ROS. A prototype is developed and experiments on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) as well as autonomous navigation experiments are conducted to verify the practicality of the chassis design.