A Unified Approach of Denavit-Hartenberg Representation to Kinematics Equations of Two-wheel Mobile Robots for Undergraduate Robotics Education

Abstract

A two-wheel mobile robot is a kind of balancing system of which two-wheel torques control the balancing angle as well as the position of the robot. The robot is a combined system of a wheeled mobile robot and an inverted pendulum, which is a non-holonomic and under-actuated system. The robot is constrained in kinematics and driven by two-wheels. The kinematics equations of two-wheel mobile robots are derived from Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) parameters for drawing the robot postures for an effective undergraduate robotics education, which are used for the derivation of the kinematics of serial robot manipulators. Assuming the wheel movement as a linear joint motion and the heading angle as a revolute joint motion, the kinematics of the two-wheel mobile robots can be derived from the D-H configuration to draw the robot postures.