A Friction-Based Kinematic Model for Skid-Steer Wheeled Mobile Robots

Skid-steer drive systems are widely used in mobile robot platforms. Such systems are subject to significant slippage and skidding during normal operation due to their nature. The ability to predict and compensate for such slippages in the forward kinematics of these types of robots is of great importance and provides the means for accurate control and safe navigation. In this work, we propose a new kinematic model capable of slip prediction for skid-steer wheeled mobile robots (SSWMRs). The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of both translational and rotational prediction error on a dataset composed of more than 6 km worth of trajectories traversed by a skid-steer robot. We also publicly release our dataset to serve as a benchmark for system identification and model learning research for SSWMRs.