Positioning and navigation motion control system for wheeled mobile robot

Abstract

Being able to navigate accurately is one of the fundamental capabilities of a mobile robot to effectively execute a variety of tasks including docking, transportation, and manipulation. To achieve the desired navigation accuracy, mobile robots are typically equipped with on-board sensors to observe persistent features in the environment, to estimate their pose from these observations, and to adjust their motion accordingly. Odometry is the most widely used navigation method for mobile robot positioning because it provides good short-term accuracy, is inexpensive, and allows very high sampling rates. This paper presents experimental results of a new method for detecting and correcting odometry errors. The fundamental idea of odometry is the integration of incremental motion information over time, which leads inevitably to the accumulation of errors. Particularly, the accumulation of orientation errors will cause large position errors [1], which increase proportionally with the distance travelled by the robot. The errors arising during robot working were discussed and suggestions to correct these errors were presented.