Autonomic Wheel Alignment for Mobile Robots

Abstract

In pursuit of future space exploration, NASA has described the concept of Multiple Rovers; this concept was based on the fact that multiple rovers are capable of completing more tasks and covering a larger area than a single rover.However, the amount of expenditure put into each rover will be greatly reduced compared to that of a single dedicated rover.These lower spec.rovers would be more vulnerable to hardware faults.However, if the software system built into each rover is based on autonomic principles, then the ability of the rover to continue to operate would be greatly increased.When studying the features of mobile robots using the X80-h from Dr. Robot, it was found that this type of Robot can suffer from a wheel alignment issuewere, when given a command to move forward by a given distance, it would either veer off to the left or to the right.This resulted in the Robot not arriving at the expected destination.The alignment 'error' was not always consistent for each Robot; it was found that after each attempt the Robot was at various distances from the expected destination point.To plot the path of the Robot at each attempt, Indoor GPS was used.The Indoor GPS provides x, y and degree of angle data which can then be recorded into a database.The goal is to use this data to create an algorithm to compensate for the alignment error; this will therefore improve the Robots reliability to reach its expected destination.