A modular approach to detailed dynamic formulation and control of wheeled mobile robot

Presently, nonholonomic mobile robots driven by wheels are being used for variety of applications where high velocity maneuvering control is very essential. The need for accurate formulation of system dynamics incorporating each & every moving parts of the robot is very important for faster movement & precise applications. This paper represents the detailed dynamic formulation based on overall robot's kinetic energy along with an advanced control scheme. Actuator dynamics have been also considered to achieve precise motion control and to design a simple controller with a low cost sensor suite. A modular approach has been adopted to derive the kinetic energy of the robot accurately & thereafter to evaluate required equations of motion. A feedback linearization based path following controller with online gain scheduling has been designed to control the mobile robot through various paths. The methodology adopted for path following control deals explicitly with detail robot-actuator dynamics and it overcomes stringent initial condition constraints. The simulation has been carried out with the parameters of a real robot and the simulation results illustrate very promising performance due to incorporation of detail robot-actuator dynamics.