Implementation of a PID Controller using Online Tuning Applied to a Mobile Robot Obstacle Following/Avoidance

The implementation of a bioinspired PID-based controller with online tuning capabilities is developed for obstacle following/avoidance of a nonholonomic mobile robot. An innovative mixture of the conventional PID controller and particle swarm optimization (PSO), which has a strong capability of adaptation across unknown scenarios, reduced objective error, brings us a novel online tuning methodology that can derive optimal controller parameters for a given scenario. It is appropriate for a kind of plant without prior knowledge or established mobile robot model. Computer simulation for obstacle following/avoidance is carried out in four different scenarios using the CoppeliaSim software and the EVA mobile robot platform. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is demonstrated trough the simulation experiment, which shows its superior performance in the training scenario, including an overshoot of 20.1 %, a settling time of 10 seconds, and a steady-state error of 0.76%.