An Integrated Path Planning and Control Framework for Nonholonomic Unicycles

— In this paper, navigation and control of autonomous mobile unicycle robots in a complex and partially known obstacleridden environment is considered. The unicycle dynamic model used has two differentially-driven wheels, with the two wheel motor torques as the system input. Two novel controllers are derived which stabilize the robot within a surrounding disk-shaped area (henceforth called a bubble) of arbitrary size for any initial velocities. The first controller takes the unicycle to the center of its bubble while the second corrects its orientation. The torque- levels can be controlled by adjusting gains. The control laws are independent of inertial parameters. An existing global planner is used by each robot to create a string of bubbles connecting its start point to its goal point, with each bubble’s size indicative of the radial obstacle-clearance available from its center. Each robot then uses its local bubble-controllers to follow its global planned path. This method is t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Kaustubh Pathak, Sunil Kumar Agrawal
• Keywords: ICRA 2005, Mobile Unicycle Robots, Robot, Robotics, Unicycle