Bio-inspired Approach for Smooth Motion Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Wheeled mobile robot (WMR) has gained wide application in civilian and military fields. Smooth and stable motion of WMR is crucial not only for enhancing control accuracy and facilitating mission completion, but also for reducing mechanical tearing and wearing. In this paper, we present a novel bio-inspired approach aiming at significantly reducing motion chattering phenomena inherent with traditional methods. The main idea of the proposed smooth motion controller is motivated by two famous Chinese sayings "haste does not bring success" and "ride softly then you may get home sooner", which inspires the utilization of pre-processing the speed commands with the help of fuzzy rules to generate more favorable movement for the actuation device, so as to effectively avoid the jitter problem that has not yet been adequately solved by traditional methods. Detail formulas and algorithms are derived with consideration of the kinematics and dynamics of WMR. Smooth and asymptotically stable tracking of the WMR along the desired position and orientation is ensured and real-time experiment demonstrates the effectiveness and simplicity of the proposed method. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.