Path tracking of a mobile robot using inertial measurement unit

Abstract

Many approaches for trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots have been proposed.Most of them are designed based on the control of robot dynamics or adopt the complicated kinematics control,which are not suitable for real-time engineering applications without powerful computing devices.A real-time tracking controller based on PD controller is presented for nonholonomic mobile robot.This algorithm holds a time cost of only 1～2 ms for each control loop in a 40 MHz embedded controller.A nonlinear-PID based velocity controller for DC driving motors is integrated with the proposed tracking controller to fulfill the path tracking control of a wheeled mobile robot(WMR).To estimate the yaw angle of WMR,a low-cost micro electro-mechanical system(MEMS) measurement unit is employed in the experimental setup.The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.