Intelligent motion control for omnidirectional mobile robots using ant colony optimization

Abstract

This article presents an intelligent system-on-a-programmable-chip-based (SoPC) ant colony optimization (ACO) motion controller for embedded omnidirectional mobile robots with three independent driving wheels equally spaced at 120 degrees from one another. Both ACO parameter autotuner and kinematic motion controller are integrated in one field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to efficiently construct an experimental mobile robot. The optimal parameters of the motion controller are obtained by minimizing the performance index using the proposed SoPC-based ACO computing method. These optimal parameters are then employed in the ACO-based embedded kinematic controller in order to obtain better performance for omnidirectional mobile robots to achieve trajectory tracking and stabilization. Experimental results are conducted to show the effectiveness and merit of the proposed intelligent ACO-based embedded controller for omnidirectional mobile robots. These results indicate that the proposed ACO-based embedded optimal controller outperforms the nonoptimal controllers and the conventional genetic algorithm (GA) optimal controllers. © 2013 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.