Design and Steering Control of a Center-Articulated Mobile Robot Module

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and steering control for an autonomous modular mobile robot. The module is designed with a center-articulated steering joint to minimize the number of actuators used in the chain. We propose a feedback control law which allows steering between configurations in the plane and show its application as a parking control to dock modules together. The control law is designed by Lyapunov techniques and relies on the equations of the robot in polar coordinates. A set of experiments have been carried out to show the performance of the proposed approach. The design is intended to endow individual wheeled modules with the capability to merge and make a single snake-like robot to take advantage of the benefits of modular robotics.