Improving dead-reckoning performance of skid-steered wheeled robots using an improved kinematic model

Abstract

Since skid-steered platform rotations have been non-trivial, existing kinematics approaches for skid-steered wheeled robots have either ignored the relationship between the rotational speed of the robot and its wheel speeds, or approximated it with a linear function, which was sometimes estimated as a function of track instantaneous center of rotations. In this paper, we propose a new kinematic model for skid-steered wheeled platforms taking into account not only the geometric properties of the robot, but also location of its center of mass, which changes the kinematics of the robot considerably due to its effect on traction of the wheels. The proposed model was verified experimentally by varying the center of mass of the robot, and its improvements to dead-reckoning performance were also experimentally verified.