Controlling a Skid-Steered Tracked Mobile Robot with Slippage Using Various Control Schemes

Abstract

Motion control of skid-steered tracked mobile robot with slippage is still of interest for many specialists and researchers. Skid-steering with slippage causes complex track terrain interactions which make the modeling and control of such systems very challenging. In this paper, various control schemes are explored and tested on the tracked robot to investigate the dynamical performance under different operating conditions. First, a PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controller is implemented and then compared with a FLC (Fuzzy Logic Controller). The main challenge in controlling the tracked mobile robot is the presence of highly nonlinear quantities due to slippage and soil shearing. Preliminary simulation results are introduced to verify the robustness of the proposed controllers under different operation conditions.