Balancing Control of Low-Cost Wheel-leg Robotics for Control and Robotics Education

The experiments for control courses play an essential role in enriching the student learning experience in control engineering and robotics education. However, most of existing popular control facilities, such as inverted pendulum, mobile robots, manipulators and flying vehicles, are often not portable devices for flexible use, such as take-home use. In this paper, we show that it is feasible to use a low cost and portable wheel-leg robot for controller design purpose. The wheel-leg robot is reconfigurable from simple to complex systems and can be used for both introductory and advanced levels of control courses. Specifically, the fundamental control method, PID, together with advanced techniques including Kalman filter, adaptive balancing, wheel-leg coordinating control are employed for balancing control in this study. Extensive results show that the wheel-leg robot can be an exemplary platform for demonstrating the core control concepts, such as stability (via balancing control), robustness to uncertainties (e.g. body weight changes), and disturbance handling (against load changes or external forces).