Synchronizing of Stabilizing Platform Mounted on a Two-Wheeled Robot

This paper represents the designing, building, and testing of a self-stabilizing platform mounted on a self-balancing robot. For the self-stabilizing platform, a servo motor is used and for the self-balancing robot, two dc motors are used with an encoder, inertial measurement unit, motor driver, an Arduino UNO microcontroller board. A PID controller is used to control the balancing of the system. The PID controller gains (Kp, Ki, and Kd) were evaluated experimentally. The value of the tilted angle from IMU was fed to the PID controller to control the actuated motors for balancing the system. For the self-stabilizing control part, whenever the robot tilted, it maintained the horizontal position by rotating that much in the opposite direction

Keep Rollin' - Whole-Body Motion Control and Planning for Wheeled Quadrupedal Robots

We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the wheels. Our approach relies on a zero-moment point based motion optimization which continuously updates reference trajectories. The reference motions are tracked by a hierarchical whole-body controller which computes optimal generalized accelerations and contact forces by solving a sequence of prioritized tasks including the nonholonomic rolling constraints. Our approach has been tested on ANYmal, a quadrupedal robot that is fully torque-controlled including the non-steerable wheels attached to its legs. We conducted experiments on flat and inclined terrains as well as over steps, whereby we show that integrating the wheels into the motion control and planning framework results in intuitive motion trajectories, which enable more robust and dynamic locomotion compared to other wheeled-legged robots. Moreover, with a speed of 4 m/s and a reduction of the cost of transport by 83 % we prove the superiority of wheeled-legged robots compared to their legged counterparts.Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter

Intelligent controllers for velocity tracking of two wheeled inverted pendulum mobile robot

Velocity tracking is one of the important objectives of vehicle, machines and mobile robots. A two wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) is a class of mobile robot that is open loop unstable with high nonlinearities which makes it difficult to control its velocity because of its nature of pitch falling if left unattended. In this work, three soft computing techniques were proposed to track a desired velocity of the TWIP. Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC), Neural Network Inverse Model control (NN) and an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) were designed and simulated on the TWIP model. All the three controllers have shown practically good performance in tracking the desired speed and keeping the robot in upright position and ANFIS has shown slightly better performance than FLC, while NN consumes more energy

Online Dynamic Motion Planning and Control for Wheeled Biped Robots

Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled robots when driving on suitably flat surfaces and versatility of legged robots when stepping over or around obstacles. This paper introduces a planning and control framework to realise dynamic locomotion for wheeled biped robots. We propose the Cart-Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (Cart-LIPM) as a template model for the rolling motion and the under-actuated LIPM for contact changes while walking. The generated motion is then tracked by an inverse dynamic whole-body controller which coordinates all joints, including the wheels. The framework has a hierarchical structure and is implemented in a model predictive control (MPC) fashion. To validate the proposed approach for hybrid motion generation, two scenarios involving different types of obstacles are designed in simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such online dynamic hybrid locomotion has been demonstrated on wheeled biped robots

Stability analysis of non-holonomic inverted pendulum system

The inverted pendulum is doubtlessly one of the most famous control problems found in most control text books and laboratories worldwide. This popularity comes from the fact that the inverted pendulum exhibits nonlinear, unstable and non-minimum phase dynamics. The basic control objective of the study is to design a controller in order to maintain the upright position of the pendulum while also controlling the position of the cart. In our study we explored the relationship that the tuning parameters (weight on the position of the car and the angle that the pendulum makes with the vertical) of a classical inverted pendulum on a cart has on the pole placement and hence on the stability of the system. We then present a family of curves showing the local root-locus and develop relationships between the weight changes and the system performance. We describe how these locus trends provide insight that is useful to the control designer during the effort to optimize the system performance. Finally, we use our general results to design an effective feedback controller for a new system with a longer pendulum, and present experiment results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis. We then designed a simulation-based study to determine the stability characteristics of a holonomic inverted pendulum system. Here we decoupled the system using geometry as two independent one dimensional inverted pendulum and observed that the system can be stabilized using this method successfully with and without noise added to the system. Next, we designed a linear system for the highly complex inverted pendulum on a non-holonomic cart system. Overall, the findings will provide valuable input to the controller designers for a wide range of applications including tuning of the controller parameters to design of a linear controller for nonlinear systems

Terminal Sliding Mode Control of Mobile Wheeled Inverted Pendulum System with Nonlinear Disturbance Observer

A terminal sliding mode controller with nonlinear disturbance observer is investigated to control mobile wheeled inverted pendulum system. In order to eliminate the main drawback of the sliding mode control, “chattering” phenomenon, and for compensation of the model uncertainties and external disturbance, we designed a nonlinear disturbance observer of the mobile wheeled inverted pendulum system. Based on the nonlinear disturbance observer, a terminal sliding mode controller is also proposed. The stability of the closed-loop mobile wheeled inverted pendulum system is proved by Lyapunov theorem. Simulation results show that the terminal sliding mode controller with nonlinear disturbance observer can eliminate the “chattering” phenomenon, improve the control precision, and suppress the effects of external disturbance and model uncertainties effectively