Autonomous Motion on Wheels

摘要

The main focus of the thesis is the autonomous motion of mobile robots, inparticular those on wheels. Chapter 2 starts with a short introduction to planning activities. Planning is the main function of the navigator, which delivers the input to the guidance system. Chapter 3 discusses the modelling of wheeled mobile robots. Both the kinematics and dynamics are treated and are illustrated with examples of the two most used configurations: a differential-drive type robot (with two driven wheels) and a tricycle-type robot (with a steered and driven front wheel). Chapter 4 deals with the guidance system. The chapter starts with the subject of trajectory generation. The chapter ends with showing the controller's performance as obtained from experiments with the PAVLOV robot, including a wall-following example. Chapter 5 describes the localization problem. Three localization methods are described and investigated for their accuracies. Chapter 6 summarizes the contents of the thesis and presents the conclusions.