Modeling and Control of an Autonomous Three Wheeled Mobile Robot with Front Steer

TL;DR

This paper develops a system model and control strategies for an autonomous three-wheeled robot with front steering, highlighting its advantages for navigation and localization, and verifies the model with experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system model and control framework for a front-steered three-wheeled robot, including a PID speed controller and trajectory control methods.

Findings

Model verified with experimental data

PID controller demonstrated effective speed regulation

Trajectory control framework successfully implemented

Abstract

Modeling and control strategies for a design of an autonomous three wheeled mobile robot with front wheel steer is presented. Although, the three-wheel vehicle design with front wheel steer is common in automotive vehicles used often in public transport, but its advantages in navigation and localization of autonomous vehicles is seldom utilized. We present the system model for such a robotic vehicle. A PID controller for speed control is designed for the model obtained and has been implemented in a digital control framework. The trajectory control framework, which is a challenging task for such a three-wheeled robot has also been presented in the paper. The derived system model has been verified using experimental results obtained for the robot vehicle design. Controller performance and robustness issues have also been discussed briefly.