Experimental validation of an autonomous control system on a mobile robot platform

Abstract

An autonomous control system designed for a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot that is programmed to emulate a fixed-wing unmanned air vehicle (UAV) flying at constant altitude is experimentally validated. The overall system is capable of waypoint navigation, threat avoidance, real-time trajectory generation and trajectory tracking. Both the wheeled mobile robot experimental platform and the hierarchical autonomous control software architecture are introduced. Programmed to emulate a fixed-wing UAV flying at constant altitude, a non-holonomic mobile robot is assigned to follow a desired time-parameterised trajectory generated by a real-time trajectory generator to transition through a sequence of targets in the presence of static and popup threats. Hardware results of the autonomous control system where the trajectory tracker applies two velocity controllers accounting for fixed-wing UAV-like input constraints, are compared to simulation results of dynamic controllers that are based on non-smooth backstepping to demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall system.